“What’s a movie you enjoyed, but never want to see again? The first time I saw Uncut Gems, as soon as it was over, I turned to my theater-going companion and said, “That was incredible, but I never want to see it again.” While I greatly appreciated the film, I found it to be so tense and stress-inducing that I decided I didn’t care to repeat the experience. That feeling didn’t change when the movie popped up on Netflix.”
Sorry To Bother You
Sometimes the desire to avoid a repeat viewing of a film is less about avoiding the bad feelings it might dredge up, than it is about preserving the memories of good ones. As much as I loved when it snuck its wildly subversive vision of capitalist dystopia into theaters in 2018, I can’t imagine ever going back to Boots Riley’s weird little sci-fi opus for a second take. The thought of diluting the sheer out-there strangeness of the turns Cash Green’s story takes is just too sad of an idea for me; better to keep the memory of shock present in my memory, than to risk allowing one of the weirdest moments I’ve ever experienced in a theater to become ho-hum through repetition. [William Hughes]
I was actually going to rewatch Amour around the time everyone was collating their Best of the Decade lists, but then my Grandma died of dementia and I just decided it was too raw a subject. Maybe one day I’ll revisit it, but not for a while.
I just subscribed to the Criterion Channel and I have been pussyfooting around Michael Haneke’s films. I’m intrigued but from what I’ve read on this site, I’m trying to build up courage and decide which one to start with. I know they are all gonna be challenging.
Oh man it’s been so long since I’ve seen Europa that I barely remember it. I’ll have to make some time. I still think Breaking the Waves is astonishing. I’ve watched that a few times, and I always end up emotionally gutted.
Black Swan.I don’t if I was just in the perfect mood, or it was just the right time in my life, but I actually said outloud, “holy shit, that was a great movie,” when the credits started rolling. The movie made sense to me in a way that I could never describe. It was like my mind woke up, took in and swallowed everything, and then shut the door. That was 10 years ago.Since then, I’ve never once considered rewatching this movie. I can’t risk losing the feeling I had when I watched it. A feeling I know was a once in a blue moon deal. It’s not worth it.
It was this movie (as was Shattered Glass for Hayden Christensen), that made me realize that Natalie Portman actually is talented. She just had terrible material to work with in the prequels and so looked like a bad actress.
Christensen’s performance in “Shattered Glass” completely blindsided me. I watched the movie on a win because I knew the story and also Hank Azaria and Chloë Sevigny, but then BOOM! ACTING!I had pretty much the same reaction seeing Robert Pattinson in “Cosmopolis.”
The thing is, all the qualities that made him annoying as Anakin (which was sadly not helped by the dialogue written for him)—the whininess, petulance, and insecurity—were perfect for Stephen Glass—who was annoying, but he was supposed to be annoying.
it’s the exact opposite. portman can only play one type, the mousey quiet girl, and when asked to play that will do well. everything else she is terrible at.
I think she was asked to be kind of affectless in the prequels. Hard to say if the result we got was her not being up to the task or poor direction. Probably both.
Odd. I had he exact opposite reaction to Natalie Portman’s acting abilities after watching Black Swan: “holy shit, it’s not the material at all – she’s actually just a legit, terrible actor.”
I know it won’t. It was never about the actual movie, it’s about more than that. Black Swan just happened to be the catalyst of something greater than itself in that moment. The way you remember the movie that was playing at the theater when a girl first let you put your hand up her shirt, or the song on the radio when you’re driving to the hospital for your kid’s birth, that’s closer to how I remember this movie. It’s not about the actual product, but the context in which you experienced it that gives it its value.
I felt exactly the same way about “Mulholland Drive” the first time I saw it, exactly, like my mind opened up and took it – like my whole being took it in. I didn’t have any desire to see it again for about twenty years, because I didn’t want to affect that experience. Finally I did, when it played at a revival theater and I realized I was tired of being the only one of my friends who had seen it. So I recommended it to them (and they know I never, ever recommend movies), and we all went together and now we’ve all seen it and I’m not so alone.
Just gonna remind everyone that there was a comic tie-in to 2001: A Space Odyssey written and drawn by Jack Kirby.And this tie-in is canon with Marvel continuity as issue 8 introduced Aaron Stack, aka Machine Man, who would later be incorporated into the Marvel Universe.
Yeah, I know Kirkman gets most of the credit for it, but 3 is where I felt it started living up to its premise, especially after the snoozefest that was 2. Fred Van Lente really opened it up.
Marvel has a history of incorporating licensed tie-ins for various properties with the Marvel Universe. Like the time the Seventh Doctor dropped off an alien robot bounty hunter on top of the then home of the Fantastic Four.And Death’s Head is fully owned by Marvel and has made occasional cameos in other comics and even recently got his own mini series. His very existence means that The Doctor, or at least a version of them, exists in the Marvel Universe.
Despite the fact that Warren Ellis is a goatlicker, it is still a good story. But knowing that Ellis coerced women into having sex with him under the guise of mentorship only to drop them like a proverbial sack of potatoes gives a lot of his work a bad taste in my mouth.
There was also a novel tie in written by Arthur C Clark(who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick) that explains a lot of information that seems to be missing (famously much of the dialogue in 2001 was cut by Kubrick). I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of the film
I think Schindler’s List is a pretty obvious pick. It’s an important movie that I’m glad I saw. But it’s so depressing that it’s really hard to re-watch.Also, the funny thing about 2001 is that I’ve seen it twice. The first time was when I was a kid and the ending gave me nightmares. The second time was when I was much older and I had seen 2010: The Year We Make Contact and read the books. It honestly gave the 2001 a huge re-watch value the second time around.
Thing about Schindler’s List, it so often shows how much joy Spielberg takes in crafting cinema, not only in the jokey scenes with Schindler hiring his secretaries, but even in the most horrific set pieces. Take the machine-gun strobe lights and ragtime piano during the liquidation of the ghetto. It’s so clever and joyfully crafted, it’s upsettingly enjoyable to watch. Compare to The Pianist, which feels so miserable and nightmarish, I can’t imagine ever going back to it again.
Yes, I have watched Schindler’s List a number of times, for this exact reason. It is just so beautifully made that, despite being extremely depressing, it still awakens something in me every time I watch it, like a kind of catharsis generator.
Ebert always said that no good movie is depressing. I think Schindler’s List supports that. It’s about horrific subject matter, but so skillfully made that I have watched it more than once. I feel like no matter what a movie is about, the point of watching it is to enjoy yourself. If I don’t have some sort of emotional catharsis watching it, I’m not even sure I want to see it once, let alone multiple times.
Good point. It seems you can engage with difficult material more if it’s told in an inventive way, as opposed to bland verité where you’re just wanting it to be over. No-one wants to wallow in misery *that* much
The fade from the Schindler Jews approaching the nearby town for the first time to their descendants walking the same field wrecks me every single damn time. You’ve watched this incredible story of hope amidst the worst of human cruelty for three hours, knowing all along it’s a true story, but to be reminded that these real people – survivors, children, grandchildren – only exist because of what you’ve just watched is something that never loses its potency.
I’d never really thought about how this “coda” to Schindler’s list is structurally similar to the “coda” of Private Ryan. But both force us to confront the most difficult thing about the movie we just watched (while reminding is it’s not just a movie).SL reminds us. This. Was. Real.PR isn’t just asking about Ryan himself, but the whole war. Was all the death and suffering worth it?
If you want a real mind-fuck, read the book it is based on.If anything, Spielberg actually underplayed and understated what Schindler actually did, because what he did, repeatedly, and over the entire war, was so damn implausible that no one would ever believe it, but the author Kinneally interviewed multiple people to verify everything. The details of the deceptions Schindler engaged in were so audacious and frankly, preposterous, it staggers the mind. He engages in Trump-levels of flattery, bullshit and gaslighting constantly, for years, and people just believe him, or if they dont – and they often dont – they play along anyway because they like him.
I think that Spielberg did the ‘joyful’ bits deliberately first to just set up a dichotomy between mood and image and second so the bits that were not ‘jolly’ would stand out.The face of the Nazi throwing dug up bodies on the fire.The avalanche of bodies that includes the pink-coated girl.I saw the film when it premiered in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 and never since, and I cannot get it out of my head.
That was one of the facets of the movie that I had struggled with years ago. I didn’t quite understand what he was after – with some of the more mass-appeal bits of humor, music-video style editing, and sentimentality here and there – esp the “I could have done more” cry-fest. Certainly, the sum of the movie overrides these concerns, and one just has to remember that Spielberg is used to doing these sorts of things for his other movies.
I would be fine living my life without being emotionally destroyed by Requiem for a Dream again. Amazing film but I can’t do that one again. I tried once years later and gave up about 25 minutes in. I could do it if forced, but not willingly. However, if you haven’t seen it you should watch it once, but expect sadness. Kids dir by Larry Clark could also qualify.
It’s a strange wording (the article title, not yours) to say one “enjoyed” a movie like Requiem for a Dream. Respected, moved by, yes, but not really “enjoyed”.
One does not “enjoy” Requiem For A Dream as much as one “experiences” it. I love it, but I couldn’t tell you the next time I plan on watching it. Or 12 Years A Slave either.
Saw it in the theater and was shaking through most if it. Have not watched it again.Kids was definitely a one-off for me. I would put forward Todd Solondz’s Happiness and Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors as also un-rewatchable.
I have only seen Happiness back in the day when IFC actually showed real indie and foreign films that were of quality. It was late at night and I was half asleep and kept wondering if the movie was real or if I was dreaming. His favorite film for me is Palindromes and yet I’ve only been able to see it once cause it’s impossible to stream and way expensive to purchase the dvd.
I love Happiness, but it is the very definition of Not For Everyone.
And shit, I’ll say this – Hereditary is a masterpiece of contemporary horror that I, a huge lifetime fan of the genre, will never subject myself to again. I can think of few other horror films that are just so relentlessly cruel. It hurts me to think of that film.
Thank you. I have almost watched that one so many times. The description just sounds so grim, like Leaving Las Vegas grim and I can’t go on that trip again. I don’t need more nightmares.
I opened this article only to write about Requiem, and here you are.My friend has an uncle, he’s an addict (and was a drug dealer, was sentenced to jail for it), she said to me that this movie glorified addiction and that’s why she didn’t like it, but I did, imo it was totally opposite of glorification and romantization.
First film I thought of when I read the headline. It’s amazing but the ending(s) are too grim for me. I am glad I saw it and would recommend it to someone emotionally tough but I won’t watch it again.
Requiem for a Dream was the very first movie I thought of when I saw the headline.I remember watching it with some friends in a dorm room my freshman year of college. The movie ended and we all walked out of the room silent. No one really knew what to say.
I have a friend who likes to take mushrooms with people who haven’t seen it and put it on halfway through. He is well on his way to becoming a serial killer.
Kids was one of the very first movies that came to my mind when I saw the headline. I saw Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer around the same tame and it absolutely belongs on the list. Rooker is absolutely mesmerizing and as much as I love his work in general, I don’t think he ever topped that performance.
I dunno. I think Michael Rooker’s performance in Eight Men Out is fantastic.Instead of playing the underbiter “Huuurrrr, you think you’re better than me?” angry redneck that became his bread and butter, he plays this suave confident, eloquent, intelligent individual who is just so charming as a 1920’s swell. It’s great.
This is a very common answer to this question, and while I understand that reaction, I revisit the film fairly often for a few reasons. The score is one of my very favorites, and I find the filmmaking so kinetic and energizing, that rather than leaving me drained, the film leaves me on a high. The subject matter is portrayed in such a bombastic manner, that I’m never all that affected by it (I find The Wrestler to be an infinitely harder watch as far as Aranofsky is concerned because unlike Requiem, everything is played so realistically). Really it strikes me as operatic more than anything, especially during that big climax with all the inter cutting between the different character stories. And I love Ellen Burstyn’s performance, my favorite of hers.
From that hysterical review, this is comedy gold:
“Requiem for a Dream” could be considered offensive by human beings.
Leto has a pus-filled, infected track mark on his arm. Connelly vomits
directly into the camera lens. People snort, smoke, and inject
anything they can get their hands on. Wayans is shown having sex with
his nude girlfriend. A drug dealer gets shot point-blank in the face.
And, of course, Burstyn gets snapped at by her refrigerator. In this
case, torrents of profanity can be viewed as a welcome relief. Rated
NC-17. 102 minutes.
Trainspotting is so much less intense than Requiem for a Dream. It has some disturbing visuals but it at least has a sense of humor. Requiem is just brutal.
Trainspotting is very different from Requiem in that Trainspotting allows humor and excitement into its world. Also the soundtrack for Trainspotting can be fun and propulsive at times (I used to jam out to the soundtrack regularly), whereas Requiem’s score is all sadness, tension and intensity. Honestly, Trainspotting only has a few scenes that might qualify as upsetting or disturbing, other than the general anxiety anytime Robert Carlyle’s (non-junkie) character is on-screen because he can turn violent at any moment. I’ve re-watched Trainspotting a number of times and never had the desire to re-watch Requiem. I thought Requiem was well done, but its full of basically anti-drug-propaganda-levels of constant horror and pain for all its characters.
My problem with both films was that I thought every single featured character in both of them were unrepentant scumbags, who if I knew in real life, I would avoid like the plague. The only one who elicited any empathy was Jennifer Connelly’s character, given where she ends up and what she ends up doing to support herself, and even then my response was still ‘what did you fucking expect to happen, you idiot?’Yah, junkies need help and should get it. These junkies were also all assholes.Think anyone from Trainspotting wasn’t? They kill a baby through neglect, and none of them give a shit for more than two minutes. Even Ewan McGregors character, despite having nightmares about it, really doesn’t show any waking upset. His big revelation from the event was figuring out who the father was, based on which of his friends got most (momentarily) upset.By the end, I was rooting for the heroin to kill all of them.
I know Requiem would be the top comment.I watched it with my roomate who’s mother was a drug addicted prostitute. After that movie my roomate went into a weeklong depression and didn’t leave bed for a week. It’s a powerful movie whether or not you consider it good or bad.
I remember gripping the armrests of my seat in the theater forcing myself to finish the film, feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I saw the film alone and it was so fucking intense. When it ended, I made a b-line from the theater to my car and turned the radio on loud so I could have anything else in my brain for a few minutes.
I actually have Requiem on BluRay. For some reason I was compelled to re-watch it over and over again one summer. You do eventually lose the depression and can appreciate it for the filmmaking skill and astonishingly good performances. It helps if you watch it with director commentary, which is funny as hell and includes a story about . . . ——SPOILERS—— . . . . writers from Fangoria visiting the set while they were filming the scene when Jared Leto gets his arm chopped off. In order to impress them, they turned the blood machine ALL THE WAY UP, so when the saw hits Leto’s fake arm, the ENTIRE SET was immediately drenched in blood.
I wanna say, as a huge horror fan, why was Fangoria on set? But then it occurs to me that yes, Requiem is one of the most disturbing and scariest horror films ever made.
The Accused. That’s one I don’t want to see ever again. Jodie Foster was great that film, but the rape scene – with everyone just looking on – was very difficult to sit through. I’ve never seen Requiem for a Dream; however, I just watched the trailer (long version) and, although I love anything Ellen Burstyn is in, I might have to give that one a miss. Horrifying.
A Clockwork Orange. I saw the movie when I was way pretty young (around 13 or 14, so probably too young) and even then I knew that the movie’s vision of humanity was too dark and depressing for me to ever want to sit through it again. If only it included that final chapter that Kubrick left out.
I think that it was a good decision to leave it out; you can argue that Alex is a product of his society and not entirely to blame for his actions, but he’s a nasty piece of work; the idea that a psychopath like him would suddenly decide to become “good” out of his own free will doesn’t seem very plausible. The story works better without this “revelation”.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I think the last way I’d describe his transformation is as an act of free will. He’s mentally tortured into being physically repulsed by violence. And at the end he’s decided to go right back.
We’re talking about the end of the book, not the movie. In the book, after being cured of the brainwashing, Alex decides to be good and refrain from ultraviolence out of his own free will. In the movie, it’s presumed that he will go back to his old ways, which makes more sense. The book can only really be understood in terms of the author’s Christian beliefs — in which being good by brainwashing isn’t really being good, but true repentance is.
What criminal, exactly, has ever been made to “be good” via brainwashing?? That’s my problem with both the book and the movie. Maybe there are some incidents of such a thing occurring – even though we’ve never heard of them – but it sure as shit isn’t some sweeping movement that’s been trying to rob mankind of its free will. The movie is like a grotesque satire about something that, in reality, isn’t even an issue. But Kubrick sure seemed convinced, and he was awful good at convincing people he was thinking on a deeper level than they were. (That said, I’ve watched “Dr. Strangelove” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” about ten times apiece.)
Well obviously, none. The “Ludovico technique” is pure fiction, although it featured some ideas like subliminal messages that were actually taken seriously at the time of its writing. I guess the topical nature for Kubrick wasn’t really the brainwashing but the rise of youth violence, which was a real issue in the US and UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
They’ve confused the film with the novel. The novel ends with Alex leading a new gang, but feeling bored with a life as a thug and deciding to make a change. When Grove Press bought the rights to A Clockwork Orange they decided to cut that final chapter much to Anthony Burgess’ chagrin. Kubrick based his script on the American edition. When Grove lost the rights to the novel, a revised edition with the original final chapter was released by W.W. Norton. That’s they version that’s still in print today and it includes a scathing foreword by Burgess regarding the omission of the final chapter.
Burgess was interested in the idea of free-will, so the novel initially contains the Ludovico technique violating that, and then in the last chapter Alex changing in a more natural way.
You have to remember the genesis of A Clockwork Orange is Burgess’ pregnant wife being viciously assaulted by a group of American soldiers during WWII, leading to her miscarriage and (although she wasn’t killed in the immediate aftermath) the alcoholism that would ultimately take her life. So I think that ending (someone who has committed atrocities being able to change) may have held some kind of therapeutic importance to Burgess.
When I was in college I went to a late-night screening of A Clockwork Orange at the campus theater. Not only seeing it, but actually winning a door-prize DVD copy of the film.Which I have never watched since.
I agree with you on that one. I was also very young, around 12 or so, when I saw that film and it was very disturbing. I’ve never had any desire to watch it again, in spite of the fact that it’s relatively tame by today’s standards.
My problem with Kubrick is that he is able to make great points about architecture and oppression, but then he fucks it up with what he considers to be oppressive or elite music. Brutalism as violence? Yeah. Bloody singing in the rain? Or the music cues in The Shining or 2001? Stanley, man, read more essays about music.Anyway, all his movies are rewatchable at least for those aesthetic choices.
I finally got to see it about thirty years after it first came out, and I agree. As much as I love Kubrick (2001 is one of the few films I’ll watch in a theatre whenever I can), A Clockwork Orange is too bleak and too brutal for me to summon up any enthusiasm to watch again.
Same here. I’m not planning on watching that movie ever again. My main reason is that I can’t stand any movie or TV show that make criminals look cool.
Grave of the FirefliesIt is the only war movie I’ve ever seen that doesn’t glorify war in any way. To quote the film critic Ernest Rister (by way of Roger Ebert), “It is the most profoundly human animated film I’ve ever seen.” Even thinking about it now, 20 years later, it still hurts.
I believe I first heard about Grave of the Fireflies in the comments here, marketed to me as the ‘saddest animated movie ever’ or thereabouts. I thought I’d be my own judge of that, and sure enough, yeah, pretty much.
I remember being able to see it in full on YouTube, at least then. It’s definitely worth a watch. Sad, of course, but it isn’t the kind of wrenching, soul-blackening fare that I’ve heard described as ‘misery porn’, etc. It’s interesting seeing Japanese animation in the 1980s and how it compares to its American counterpart at the time as well.
Yup. This was the film I was going to post as well. That movie absolutely wrecked me after my first and only viewing about 15 years ago. I’m glad I saw it and I thought it was amazing and I think everyone should watch it at least once but once is enough. Side note. I used to correspond with Ernest Rister on the IGN movie/dvd message boards in the early 2000’s. Really cool guy. His Ebert connection gave him serious nerd cred on the boards lol.
It’s the only Takahata that many people have watched for some reason, while his work is full of wonderful humanistic animes as Heidi. I still cannot understand that canon, where if you want to check some Takahata, check that kinda exploitative children suffering anime.
One thousand times yes on this. It’s the first movie I thought of. I saw it about ten years ago, in a theatre and it was really good and I’m glad I did. But never ever ever again.
For me, its probably Schindler’s List, My Beautiful Laundrette, and God’s Own Country. I watched SL in like 9th grade because my history teacher gave us the assignment “watch a holocaust movie” for homework. There’s a scene where they’re forcing the prisoners to build the camps and this woman, a jewish civil engineer tells them that they’re building the base wrong and that they have to do it again or the whole thing will collapse; The head nazi has her executed, shot in the head; he then has them do what she said. My older sister is a civil engineer, and that scene still haunts me to this day. That movie prompted me to do a lot of research into the holocaust and fascism and I’m grateful for that, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again.My Beautiful Laundrette is the first movie I ever felt represented in. When I was maybe 14 or 15, I waited until I knew I’d be home alone for the night, and then watched it on an incognito tab on my computer. Watching a gay, Pakistani man be the main character in a movie who is complex and three-dimensional, and who ends the movie alive and happy, is something I never thought I’d see. It made me feel real, like I actually existed and wasn’t completely isolated in my experiences. He even ended up with a young Daniel Day Lewis! However, there are a lot of not-so-good reviews for that movie, and I definitely look back at it with rose-coloured glasses. I’d rather not watch it again and be disappointed with it. It’ll stay as a happy, nostalgic memory.God’s Own Country felt profound and extremely emotional for me for similar reasons to MBL, and while it has a happy ending overall, watching it is an emotional rollercoaster for me that I don’t know if I ever want to go on again. I love movies that make me feel things, but I’d kill for a few fun gay action/adventure movies that I could turn off my brain for and just enjoy. If I could just watch a movie where Poe Dameron shoots space nazis and kisses boys, or Billy Kaplan saves the day with his boyfriend, that’d be wonderful.
Eh, I say fuck the not-good reviews for My Beautiful Launderette. I think the movie is, in that ‘80s avant garde cinema type way, fearless and also beautifully cast. I especially remember the scene in the launderette when they are drunk and deliriously happy and begin to make love. I haven’t seen it in a long time either, but you’re not alone in feeling the importance.
Ditto Schindler’s List. Bought the deluxe anniversary DVD and turned it off after thirty minutes. And fuck all the cisgender gay white men who championed the boring ass non-chemistry non-sexual Brokeback Mountain. 1) Harry Hanmil and Michael Ontkean ruined their careers for doing Making Love and deserve all the gay awards for their bravery over dip shits like Meghan McCain and Jay-Z. And damn, the kiss in this film. For straight actors, that shit is still one of the hottest sceens, gay or straight. Not that gay cisgender white American males cared and acted like Bareback Mountain’s cracker fest was actually groundbreaking cinema. Zzzzzzz…
It may have gotten some bad reviews when it first came out, but I think My Beautiful Launderette is now considered a classic British film. It holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Shrinking the width of your browser window forces it to act like a normal page. It’s a pain in the ass, but it beats dealing with the endless clicking bullshit.
I don’t know if I just never noticed it before, but at least now you can bypass the slideshow and go to the comments. To be clear, AVClub, I hate the slideshows and would like to not have them.
My procedure on their listicles now is : *click* “Ah, shit, it’s a slideshow” *doesn’t read article, scrolls down to see who has already complained about the slideshow*
I don’t know if it’s true for everyone but I can just click “start slideshow” and on the second page there’s a “list slides” button at the top right. It’ll give you a page neatly listing all the entries.
I’m just going to bet that before we see the end of the godawful slideshow, Big Boy Corpos behind G/O Media will nix comments to eliminate the complaints- then there’s nobody that has a problem with their shite!
I almost never want to see any movie again. There’s too many out there to repeat them. I have a few like Snatch and a few others many times. But I generally don’t. Even though I seem to have collected them back in the day. But there are times where if I’m bored and I want to watch something easy I’ll put it on again. The first The Thing I’ve watched many times.
In some ways, rewatching feels like an artifact of the time when finding something new and reasonably good took a bit of a physical, mental, or added financial cost, like driving to a video store or scouring cable listings and waiting. I’m in my 30’s, and I feel like I’m about 1000% less likely to rewatch something now than when I owned a dozen of my favorites on VHS. Because if you have one or more streaming services, there’s always something new worth checking out at the push of a button.
I’d be curious if there are any generational differences in the likelihood and number of repeat viewings of favorite movies.
There’s probably something to this, when I was an 80s kid I would watch a movie over and over just because it was on HBO a lot, or it was one of the few things we had on VHS. Then when we moved to DVDs in the 90s, I owned only 100 movies plus the three art house Netflix discs that I never watched and never sent back. There were always really hard limits on the new movies available to watch at home, and because so many movies are bad, it just naturally led to repeat viewings of the good stuff.My kids like to watch the same few things over and over again even though they have an infinite amount of content available, though, so part of this is just human nature.
That’s like being stuck in a hotel room for three days and enduring the shit cable – watching the same “Game of Thrones” episode three times in one DAY.
I’ve actually started rewatching stuff more and more since I hit my late 20s. (I’m early 30s now.) I’ve realized that there’s a lot of stuff out there that other people like, but just isn’t for me. (I put on John Wick last week and turned it off after 40 minutes. So…the movie is just Keanu Reeves killing bad guys because his wife is dead?) But the really good stuff gets deeper with every viewing. Blade Runner, The Thing, Ugetsu…those are films I can watch over and over and discover new things every time.
I’m 43 and don’t like it often. Though now that I think of it there’s more movies, like Prestige and in fact a lot of Nolan’s films, I have rewatched a few times. I do however try not to go back to far in my childhood to rewatch movies. I find it turns out disappointing because what I once enjoyed I turn on and I’m like, “Why did I like this shit?” The Bill and Ted movies for instance. Though I still want to watch the new one.
Rewatching was definitely an artifact of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when VCRs and cable provided easy access to a narrow selection of films/shows. And theaters were also beneficiaries of that limited access. There were a number of movies I saw repeatedly on the big screen in my teens and 20s simply because they were available – the original Star Wars films most obviously and excessively, but even stuff like Wrath of Khan, or Excalibur. Today, it’s very rare for me to rewatch something unless I’m specifically introducing it to someone who hasn’t seen it yet. I could count on one hand the number of movies I’ve seen more than twice made since the mid-’90s
Weirdly enough, having so many movies on streaming often means I will scroll through dozens movies and then up just re-watching something I have already seen instead. I have a huge collection of movies and shows on DVD/blu-ray, and used to re-watch lots of stuff because I was showing it to new people. Now I have no new people and barely see any friends or family outside of my wife, but on my own I re-watch stuff that I know I will enjoy instead of committing to something I may or may not enjoy. I’ve re-watched Into the Spider-verse, Mad Max Fury Road, and The Guest like 4 or 5 times each in the last few years, because the chances are very small that anything new I watch is going to provide me with as much entertainment as my 5th re-watch of any of those three movies.
I’m not someone who rewatches things often but I have found recently since hitting my mid-forties that if I rewatch something from 30 years ago, if I only saw it the once I barely have any memory of it unless it was a film I really loved. Even then it’s rare that I revisit something, but it has encouraged me to occasionally give something a second chance.
I guess I should stress that I was a marijuana addict from 20 – 43 though (and am only just over 2 years sober) so that could be why.
Also: Being 46 is fucking weird. I’m not sure I like it at all.
Not sure about generational but I think maybe it has more to do with age. Just generally, you’re more passionate about things when you’re younger as well as still curious. You want rewatch things because you love it and you want to explore everything about that movie. When you’re older, you’re less passionate about the movie but also more aware of how things work and less likely to want to explore.
For me it’s more emotional. I was in a certain emotional space when I experienced some of my favorite stories (Harry Potter, Halt and Catch Fire), and going back to them feels weird and off to me.
Idk. I have probably watched The Prestige a dozen times. I always find something knew. On the negative side, though, if you already know the action’s timeline, a lot of the film’s tension is lost.
The prestige is a rare twist movie that actually gets better for me on rewatches. The shock of it was sadly a one time deal, but the ability to appreciate the subtle movements of the twists make that film hold up very well for me.
I’ve got a collection of about twenty or thirty favorite movies on my computer. I almost never watch them again from start to finish. Every now and then, though, I get the itch, and I go scrolling through the list for the movie that has the scene that I want to see again because that moment in the movie made me feel a particular thing that I’d like to feel again. Never fails.
I look at great paintings a second time, listen to great music far more than once, read great books a second time, and watch great movies a second time, if the mood strikes me. And there’s still enough time available to take in lots of other stuff, as long as you don’t die.
I will watch a movie again if watching it with someone who’s never seen it before–that makes the experience fresh for me. Otherwise i agree. And it’s even more the case for novels for me. I can’t imagine reading a novel twice.
Yes, I will watch a movie again if somebody I’m with hasn’t seen it. That’s a great factor to get me to do it again. And I’m the same with books. No matter how long ago I read it it always seems I’ve just read it. It’s weird because I have a bad memory.
There are enough mediocre movies in the world that sometimes I’d rather watch something I already know is good. There are also a lot of great movies that I haven’t seen, but if I’m being honest the film canon is pretty boring.
All of Jeremy Saulnier’s movies. Since Blue Ruin, I’ve watched each new one eagerly, if anxiously, and each of them riveted me from start to finish, and I never want to see any of them again. But I’ll eagerly watch the next one.Joker was just garbage and a waste of my time.
I’ve had Hold the Dark in my queue to watch again, but I haven’t been able to do it. I wouldn’t say I liked it the first time, but I think I need to see it again to really know how I felt about it as a film separate from the work it was adapted from. I thought the book was OK but had some shortcomings, and I want to see if the film improves on second viewing. But I just am never in the mood.
Hold the Dark is mysterious and almost mystical-moody enough that I could almost see myself putting it on again … except for that shootout set piece at the midpoint, where the guy in the house is mowing down cops. That really felt like I was witnessing a mass shooting event.
That’s exactly the part that is tripping me up, I think. It’s my own baggage, but it makes it difficult to see myself watching Hold the Dark again. (I used to work as a reporter in conflict zones, and while I am mercifully not affected by PTSD, I do sometimes have not great reactions to prolonged shootout scenes like that. Sometimes the noise is just right to send me back to a couple of close calls that I’d rather not dwell on or the aftermath of some bombings I’d prefer to forget).
Funny, I just put The Irishman on two nights ago, on a whim – “Did I actually like this movie?” – and wound up watching the entire thing, uninterrupted, after thinking “I’ll turn it off and go to bed around the halfway point.” It is, of course, infinitely better on a second viewing, when you can really focus on the moment-to-moment interactions as they happen.Honestly, what I started watching it for was to see if the digital de-aging held up in 4K. And it does! The digital effects work is fairly solid throughout!…but the movement of the actual 70-something actors, trying to carry themselves like they’re three or four decades younger? Not so much. Of course, the whole movie is presented as an old man’s reminiscence; Frank’s imaging everybody in their prime, but more pressing in his memory is when his peers felt their hips go out, and their backs began to ache, and they were lucky to sleep for two hours without having to take a piss. There’s a case to be made that whole dissonance of age thing being a conscious choice on Scorsese’s part. But it could also easily be “I just wanna cast the guys I know how to work with, I don’t wanna find young guys I don’t know to play these guys and deal with makeup and all that.”(But when it comes to young guys that Scorsese didn’t have to worry about aging as the film went on: holy shit, Jack Huston was BORN to play Bobby Kennedy.)
It took me a few sittings to get all the way through it, which was probably a mistake because I found it kind of tedious. Really the whole thing to me was a set up for the last scenes when DeNiro is still refusing to tell the FBI anything, even though every single person involved is dead. Him sitting alone, waiting by himself in a nursing home to die is a brutally downer ending.
I think it’s implying that he got what he deserved though. How he betrayed his friend Jimmy Hoffa was awful and a drawn out slow-motion train wreck of a scene
I’m glad I saw it for the sake of seeing it, but once it was over I knew I’d never watch it again, unlike Goodfellas (for example), which I saw twice in the theater (at least), or much of the rest of his “hits” which I’m happy to watch again and again.
I thought about Bobby Cannavale in a related way. That man, look at him, listen to him! He was born and raised to be in a Scorsese film. I grew up with Scorsese and his films are easy for me to digest, no matter the length. As for my One-And-Done filmmaker, it has to be Charlie Kaufman. I will sit attentive and patient as he drags me through all his little mind twists, plot jumps and jumping through cinematic hoops, but he gets my patronage once per film. Last week with “I’m Thinking Of Ending Things” I was tried and tested once more. Good for me though, it keeps me attentive and open minded.
There’s one reason I *will* go back and watch The Irishman again.All throughout, I was annoyed at the de-aging, but the thing that REALLY kept breaking suspension of disbelief was how Scorsese colored his eyes. That seemed even more unnatural to me than the de-aging and it brought the whole house of cards down more than once.Then, during that amazing scene where Pesci lays out the inevitability of the situation, I notice that DeNiro is talking to the camera and by extension us, with *only his eyes*. It was so subtle that I almost missed how we see the thought process he’s going through just by random glances at the camera. So eventually I’ll get back around to watching it to see if this is the case throughout. That one scene alone is almost as masterful as the nonverbal communication between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance.
This is definitely one I will not watch again. It was so long and tedious; I appreciated the work that went into it and many of the performances were great, but do not need to see this ever again.
Born on the Fourth of July, 1989. Tom Cruise is genuinely great in that movie. Cannot stand to watch it again. Too stressful.Honey Boy, 2019. Again, terrific performances from Shia LaBoeuf and Noah Jupe, but cannot watch a child get so brutally manipulated more than once.The Florida Project, 2017. Wonderful, moving film but absolutely wrenching to watch.Taxi Driver, 1976. Nope. Not again. Travis Bickle scares me.
Came here to find The Florida Project. Found it. Now we should be friends.Beautiful, beautiful film with beautiful performances from the entire cast. But, much like Moonlight, I’m not sure I can watch it again. I cried (and cried, and cried, and cried) at the end. I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.
I would describe its ending as joyful oblivion. Yes their life afterwards will probably be shit, but they experienced one moment of pure rapture. Was it worth it?
I re-watched Taxi Driver back when the first Joker trailer came out because it seemed so obvious to me that it was a re-telling of the same story. I used to love Taxi Driver but *man* it does not age well. Or, rather, our society has degraded to the point that Travis Bickle no longer seems like a far fetched fantasy.
Huh, I found The Florida Project a relatively easy watch even if there’s some harshness around. Usually the kids are barely aware of how bad things are.
Happiness springs to mind. It was great, but fuck, I’ll never watch it again.
I’m glad every time I see Dylan Baker in something, because he was amazing in that, but it is amazing he still has a career after fully inhabiting one of the most horrific monsters I have ever seen on screen.
Reminds me of the signs put up in theaters when Dancer in the Dark came out warning that the film led to people becoming nauseous and even throwing up. Sure enough, took a big group and two felt I’ll sigh one yacking.
I was going to say that about Von Trier in general, but I always end up rewatching his stuff….except Dogville. And Nymphomaniac…and I refuse to even watch Antichrist.
I guess I’m surprised that they apparently offered refunds before 15 minutes. For any movie. The only time I’ve ever heard about refunds was when I was watching one of the Mission Impossible movies and about three-fourths of the way through the fire alarm sounded and the theater had to be evacuated.
Happiness was so darkly funny, but good lord, the sheer level of bleak darkness in that film is overpowering. Even finishing it once was so hard. I laughed at a lot of it, but maybe that was just to stave off the horror of it.
Never saw an encore minute of it, but Happiness was one of those weird theater experiences where I was often the only one laughing at certain parts. It just has that dark humor that hits people in different ways.
I had to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? over the course of two days as it was. Watching Liz Taylor and Richard Burton brutally tearing strips off each other for a couple hours is absolutely exhausting. Great film tho.
I don’t know if I could ever make it through Hereditary again. It was just so traumatic, like a lot of it is just a mortifying drama instead of a horror movie. I think Midsommar is the worse movie but also, a bit more fun?
Schindler’s List. I saw it in the theater with my best friend and her parents when it came out. I was 13. It absolutely wrecked me. I had never cried so much at a movie in my life. To this day, 27 years later, having never seen it again, I can clearly picture scenes from it. I tried to watch it with my Husband years later and I just couldn’t do it. It was just too overwhelming.
For me it’s Grave of the Fireflies. One of the best films I’ve ever seen but it caused me to enter into a clinical depression for about a month after I watched it (and I know that sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. I walked around for about a month afterwards unable to feel pleasure from anything).
I’m surprised Gasper Noe’s Irreversible wasn’t on the list, the ending is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in cinema, but the first half is so painfully horrible that I’ll never watch it again.
I’m not surprised to see Gasper Noe’s Climax on the list though, as that’s a hateful, nihilistic piece of shit that has nothing of value to say in the slightest.
apparently a blu-ray of Irreversible is coming out with a chronological cut added in as a bonus featureso instead of something beautiful to take you out and leave you with an iota of pleasantness at the end, you get the nice stuff at the beginning and get to stew in the fucked up part with no palette cleanser when it’s over. sounds like fun
Yeesh, that sounds horrific, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the film’s overall message. I see Noe’s responsible for it too, which is bleak, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been giving him way too much credit over the years when it comes to the film.
yeah, it’s a weird thing to do. i mean, Memento came with a chronological cut on one of the DVDs and it was fun to watch once, strictly as a curiosity, because it completely fucks up the entire narrative thrust and turns it into a totally run-of-the-mill movie with no real hookbut you’ve got Noe out there himself, hyping up this Irreversible chronological cut like it’s something great and special when it’s basically just gonna make it into a standard revenge movie
Exactly, and it’s not as if there aren’t a depressing amount of those already. Either way I think I’m done with Noe now, I hated Climax so much that reviews of a new movie from him would have to be astoundingly positive for me to give it a shot.
JUST wrote the almost the same thing about this movie. Watched back when I still getting DVDs In the mail from Netflix. Great story, Intriguing, as you said, beautifully shot… nope, never again. The sheer brutality shown In several scenes… And I made the mistake of watching It before almost going to bed. I had to watch a few episodes of King of Queens to try and cleanse the palate.
I saw it at the cinema in the early afternoon and was still troubled by it at the end of the day so I can only imagine how grim it was to watch something so late.
It’s also the only time I’ve ever stared at the floor during a film, as during the rape scene I found it unbearable to watch after a few minutes and it was horrendous as to how long it went on for. I get the point Noe was making, but at the same time there was no way I could subject myself to it.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ with Bjork from 2000. I was emotionally destroyed for 24 hours after watching it in the theater in NYC during CMJ fest. Can’t even listen to the soundtrack. But it was the best movie I’ve ever seen.
A Serbian Film.Unlike many others I did not find the gore in the movie, nor the infamous scene, particularly shocking. It’s just that the emotional beats in the movie, for example the conversations between Miloš and his son, were so perfect the first time around and work best when you don’t know in advance what will happen to the characters. The entire movie is etched into my mind, from start to finish, anyway, since just about every scene, even the non-violent ones, is rather unique and recognisable.
That’s one that not only would I not expect to want to watch again, but after reading the description (and against my better judgement watching the ending online) I have exactly zero intention of ever viewing. It sounds like someone won a contest for most miserable screenplay and the prize was having it filmed.
Pretty much my thoughts about it as well. Who can be the biggest gross asshole for no reason should not be a filmmaking/screenwriting achievement people should strive for.
I was curious if someone would bring up Serbian Film. Ya…the film is quite good despite its grim and upsetting nature but like my roomie said (he kinda “forced” me to watch it about 10 years ago) while it may be a well made film I would recommend it to no one. Its rough man.
I can definitely understand it with Uncut Gems (so tense) and Sorry to Bother You (so weird… albeit, a weirdness I do enjoy going back to myself).For me I think it’s a tie between The Road (though I did pick up a copy of that to watch again recently… I just haven’t managed it) or Bone Tomahawk.Both great… just hard to find the right time/mood to want to watch either!
Uncut Gems is the only movie I can recall where I felt a palpable sense of relief at the end of the film. I think I actually said, “Thank God,” out loud in the theater. I just needed him to stop. Stop talking, stop ruining his life for no reason, just stop. I related very much to the goons in that moment.
I’m never sure how to react when I hear people say that they really wanted Howard to win and that makes the ending more difficult for them (I know that isn’t what you’re saying). I do find the ending difficult, but that’s more because the whole movie has set up for viewers, at times in anguished detail, that Howard can never succeed because he always has to go higher, take another risk, never stop, and also because the Safdie brothers and Eric Bogosian manage to slowly make you care about Howard’s father-in-law and see him not as just another thug shaking Howard down for money but as someone who does want to help but is trapped in the same life and also unable to stop Howard from hurting himself and those around him. I sometimes wonder if part of the reason Julia is built up more in her own right in the last third of the movie is to make the ending not quite as bleak – she’s going to have a chance, even if Howard isn’t.
I found Uncut Gems an interesting watch, but beyond the actual sound design and editing it was never really “tense” for me. There was nothing that made me care about Sandler’s character, and it was obvious from early on that he was just going to keep making bigger and crazier bets and deals until it caught up with him. I felt bad for some of the other characters roped into his nonsense, but that was the extent of my emotional connection to the movie.
I agree the sound and editing helped quite a bit. I thought Sandler gave a great performance but other than the scene where he broke down talking about what a fuckup he is (which he quickly forgot, as many adrenaline junkies tend to do), I didn’t really sympathize with him. I’m not sure we were meant to, but either way the real stories in the film for me were those around him and how they had to cope with him. There was one other scene where I felt for him – when he was trying to talk to his daughter after he embarrassed her at the play, and she was just tuning him out the way a teenager often does with their parents, not realizing that her father was so messed up and was barely making it through each day alive. It had a lot of layers, and they didn’t overegg the pudding by trying to make us feel one way or another for father or daughter, instead just letting the scene play out naturally.
I wanted Howard to win, but partly because I was so impressed with the callback to the broken buzz-lock door at his jewelry store after such a frenetic pace of horrifying decisions. The dumb, crazy luck of this guy. Why not keep it going?
Also, the suspense must be at least somewhat better-suited to people like me who know enough about basketball to enjoy the novelty of Kevin Garnett in a gritty movie with Adam Sandler, but not enough to know the results of the real Celtics playoff game being gambled on at the end.
I started watching Uncut Gems at home with my mom, using a friend’s screener DVD (the perks of being friends with an awards show voter). It was so singularly unpleasant that after 20 minutes we had to turn it off. I finished it later that night when my mom had gone to bed, but damn was every single minute of it suffering. Someone in another comment above mentioned Ebert saying no good movie was depressing. This is why Uncut Gems doesn’t fall into the category of a movie I “enjoyed.” I’ll never watch it again because the first time was so unpleasant, I never want to experience that again. To this day, I cannot say whether it was a good film or not because it was so assaultive to the viewer that I found it impossible to focus. That, to me, isn’t what narrative filmmaking should ascribe to be, but I suppose reasonable people can disagree on this. I can’t say whether Sandler deserved more nominations, because the performance was all noise to me. So I for one will never watch it again. I barely made it through the first time, and I love challenging/non-traditional films. Heck, I loved the suffer-fest Ida. But Uncut Gems was a bridge too far.
I think it did a remarkable job at capturing a certain kind of person. The one that lives for drama. The one that, try as hard as they might, can’t simply just *be.*
YES, Uncut Gems stressed me out from the very beginning to the end. I just wanted it to be over. Too much yelling, too many people, just too much, even though it was well acted, it just needed to stop.
I stopped Uncut Gems about 2/3 through because something came up, not because I wanted to stop watching. I was enjoying it, but I have no interest in going back to finish it.
Never seen the movie; reading the book once was enough. It’s the rare story where you’re looking for how the author is going to work out a happy ending, but realizing early on that the entire situation is completely beyond hope. The fact that you actually feel you’ve gotten a happy ending with the way things work out is testament to how bleak the rest of the story is. McCarthy is my favorite author, and he says more about humanity with fewer words than any other work I have encountered.
I don’t know what you’re talking about with the book. They got to the bunker which was full of food and all their needs were looked after and the didn’t have to scavenge anymore.Great uplifting ending. I did notice there were more pages past that point but I’m not big on reading appendices attached to the main story. If it’s important enough to the plot, it’d be in the main narrative itself, wouldn’t it?
The movie Us. I’m not much of a horror fan, so there’s that. When the horror comes with a great heaping side of social commentary the way Us did, I may have to watch it again in the same night just to make sure I got it and then I’m done.
The English Patient, because I saw it and loved it and don’t want to see any flaws in a subsequent viewing.Audition, because I saw it and was terrified and don’t want to be terrified to that level ever again.
There are quite a few, since I rarely revisit comedies, or movies which revolve around a major plot twist, simply because of the supposed surprise, although there are exceptions simply through the performances or the cleverness of the construction such as Psycho and a number of others up to something like Knives Out, and giallos are a delicious pleasure. On the other end of the scale I won’t be rewatching much of Tartovsky, Fassbinder or Eisenstein, the heavier end of the serious market, although I’ve seen and mostly enjoyed them, and I’m also someone who will never watch Salo again, or Elem Klimov’s utterly crushing Come And See, or Vaclav Harmoul’s The Painted Bird, which I caught at last year’s LFF. Incredibly powerful but I’m one and done with those, thanks.
This is one of my favourite scenes from any movie but I can’t watch the whole movie again. The ending is so viciously drenched in bile than I just feel too uncomfortable even thinking about it. I much prefer the one from the book in that it shows all parties concerned have learned something from the experience, especially the adults who should have known better and especially with hindsight can realise their perspective better (it was just a student election, not a big thing in the grand scheme of things at all, really as opposed to the movie where no-one seemed to have learned anything).I later learned they did film something closer to the end of the book courtesy of a copy of at least part of it found on a VHS at a flea market or something but it wasn’t executed that fantastically so I can understand why they reshot it due to it being a bit of a wet squib in ending the movie.Some scenes were done better than the book (like Tammy’s election speech above) but others like the ending originally made that was more similar to the book were not.
I feel that way about a lot of Alexander Payne’s films. There’s a nastiness to him that kind of rubs me the wrong way (even though I have watched Sideways multiple times). I never could figure out what the point of that one scene in About Schmidt where Nicholson meets the younger couple and tries to make out with the wife was. Election is a funny film, but it bugs me that Matthew Broderick ends up in such a shitty place. He made a few bad decisions and it ruined his life. I don’t think he deserves everything that happens to him.
Cheating on his wife and sanctimoniously trying to screw over a bunch of high school kids by deliberately altering the outcome of a student election for no good reason other than he doesn’t like one of the candidates – who is, to be fair, unlikable – is ‘a few bad decisions’?
I don’t remember a whole lot from the movie (I liked it a lot but it’s been years and years since I saw it) but I have a vivid memory of about three seconds of it— a shot from inside a moving car, out the back, and a thrown (by Broderick) milkshake splatting into the back window. Is that from the ending? Or near it?
I think it was a giant cup of Pepsi, not a milkshake. As a callback to when he and Tracey Flick argued about Coke vs. Pepsi and how Pepsi was inferior. He was still drinking the inferior stuff all the way to the end!
Man, I wish Jessica Campbell (Tammy) had been in more stuff. I had a big (age-appropriate, I was 14) crush on her after Election, and other than a memorable guest role on Freaks and Geeks it seems she only did like 3 other movies and then quit acting.
I recently watched F&G for the first time and was pleasantly surprised that Jessica was in it, as like you I had a massive crush on her when I first saw her in Election. I always wonder what she’s up to these days as she seems to have disappeared.
I love this movie (and Matthew Broderick is one of my favorite actors) but it is such a hard watch for me that if I see it on tv, I watch for a minute and get out before I’m too affected.
The Shape of Things — Neil LaBute was just so cruel to poor Paul Rudd! I instantly knew I could never watch it again, but I thought it was a great film. In retrospect I wonder if it holds up, so it might be best not to revisit anyway.
Casting Paul Rudd was a particularly brilliant cruelty. Fucking LaBute, man. I love his work, but it also makes me think there’s no way he’s not an asshole.
There are a lot of movies I like but I’m not seeking them out, and no one channel-surfs anymore, so I’m not going to stumble across them and say to myself, “ooh, I’ll keep it here for a while.” I suppose the question is about good movies but also have some element to them that make the viewer say “Oh my God, that’s horrible!” But all the movies I can think of that are like that are straight-up motherfucking classics I’ll happily watch a bunch, like Robocop (of course Murphy’s brutalization is just ick) or Braveheart (multiple de-limbings in battle scenes, ends with torture).I can’t think of anything I’ve seen that’s just emotionally draining to watch. And I typically don’t care for movies that set out to get that reaction, anyway.
I literally said as we were leaving the theater, “I’m glad I saw that, but I have no desire to see it ever again.” It belongs to a whole category of movies for me that I describe as “I like it, but I’m not going to put it on in the background while I clean the house.”
It took me a good ten years before I could re-watch There Will be Blood, and I only really returned to it because I was assigning it my class. I liked it again on second viewing, but I don’t assign it every time I teach that class. It sort of takes it out of me. Conversely, a similarly difficult film like No Country for Old Men, I find eminently re-watchable. It makes the cut every year.
I always associate those two films with each other, to the point where it consistently takes me a few seconds to remember which is which whenever one or the other comes up. I don’t know why (maybe because of the long-ish names and/or both being released the the same year). But yeah, now that you mention it, I share the same feelings as you do in regard to re-watching.
The names and the proximity of their releases to each other lends itself to that impression, definitely. I think they’re both thematically similar as well. They grapple with ideas about what America is/can/should be, with the onrushing future vs the America of the past vs. the myth of America, the corruption of men, and the ways we exploit each other. Both films seem to share a tone and a weariness if not a time period or cinematic style. They’re actually pretty good companion pieces, and the years when I teach both films, the students often have great discussions about what these films say about America. I’ve also recently done Hell or High Water alongside There will be Blood, and it went well, too. Lots of great discussions about capitalism and the world it creates.
It’s gorgeous. Worth re-watching for the composition and cinematography alone. Of course, I am a huge Kubrick fan and this film seems to draw from him quite a bit.
Probably Looper? I’m not sure if I actually liked it. I *feel* as if I did, I saw it in theaters and bought it when it came out, but I’ve never ever felt the desire to rewatch it.
God I love that movie. Saw it for the first time last year, and I’ve watched it four times since. Giulietta Masina is such a pure beautiful spirit. The hypnosis scene wrecks me — such a perfect marriage (literally) of formal brilliance and a brilliant performance.
There’s libraries full of movies that fit into this category for me; there’s so many movies that I loved but – for whatever reason – have no desire to watch again. Here’s a list that comes to mind most immediately, in no particular order other than when they came to me:Roma Road to Perdition I’m Thinking of Ending Things Sweet Movie The Beast (le Bete, 1975) Any movie by Gaspar Noe (i.e. Irreversible) Any movie by Lars von Trier (i.e. Antichrist, Meloncholia, Nymphomaniac, etc.) Any movie by Harmony Korine (i.e. Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, etc.) Any movie by Larry Clark (except for Kids) A Serbian Film
I’m someone that usually doesn’t rewatch movies, although in most cases it’s more a ‘don’t want to’ than ‘actively won’t’. I’ll watch most movies if they’re on and I don’t have something else to do.The one exception may be Idiocracy. I used to love it, it’s the kind of movie that gets by on the sheer density of jokes (see also Airplane, my absolute favorite). But as I started to realize the actual politics of the movie—and crucially that I disagreed hard with them—I turned pretty hard against it, and I don’t think I could stomach watching it again, seeing that worldview.
Those people, actually.It’s largely ruined by that opening montage of the two families, nailing in the stance of ‘society turns to crap because (poor) stupid people are breeding while (rich) smart people aren’t’. Which is, you know, classist at best and painfully eugenics-ey at worst. And Mike Judge has generally put down that that’s the ‘correct’ reading.Which is a shame, because without that opener it becomes a whole lot better, with the time-jump montage essentially pinning the blame on capitalism driving intellectuals away from improving the world in favor of profits. Brawndo didn’t get used to water crops because people genuinely thought it was a good idea, but because Brawndo decided to market it like it was.
That’s one of my favorite bits :(No, you’re sort of right in that assessment although he’s also making of fun of the white collar Yuppie types for being smug and so self-centered that they think having a kid gets in the way of their personal needs and fulfillment. It’s not like they’re too busy trying to save the world or something, they’re basically just wanting to be rich and successful. Demographically, there’s some truth behind it. But you’re right, it is a bit problematic.
Atonement. If you haven’t read the book and don’t know what’s coming, it can wreck you. I had to watch pride and prejudice twice afterwards to get rid of that awful feeling.
It’s stunning to look at. Keira’s green dress earns it’s attention. I’ve always wondered how people who read the book first felt about it, if it had the same emotional devastation. ***SPOILERS***I knew something wasn’t right from his story. You don’t survive a wound like he had. But when the twist came, I was still blind-sided. I have never been so wrong about the reliability of a narrator before.
God, that movie is stunning. I guess I’ve avoided rewatching it inadvertently because my mind was just so blown by it the first time, it’s basically impossible to recapture that feeling again on a rewatch. (I found it to be the good kind of wrecking though, at least for me, not the hurty feel bad kind.)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Great movie, saw it in the theater (when I was barely 17!) and I have no need to ever see it again. I still remember all of it, so much so that when Michael Nyman’s score showed up in that Mister Rogers trailer I instantly started crying.More recently it’d be Where the Wild Things Are. Someone gave me the Blu-Ray as a present and it’s just been collecting dust. I loved it, but.
I saw “TCTTHW&HL” when I was 19, and almost walked out of the theater, about half way through. But I toughed it out and stayed for the whole movie. I did, however, cry hysterically the whole walk home. Every time I think I should give it a rewatch I just can’t bring myself to do it.
“Dead Ringers” is another one that left me totally freaked out by the end of it. That is another one I will never watch again.
Mentioned it in a thread the other day. Enjoyed Terminator Salvation in the theater and even bought the blu ray. Haven’t watched it in years because I don’t want to ruin that joy in retrospect.
Children of Men. Fantastic movie but I was so tense and anxious through the whole thing, and then it left me with such an unsettled, anxious feeling for hours afterward.
I felt similarly with Synecdoche NY after Philip Seymour Hoffman died— I’d been planning to rewatch it, then he passed, and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it again yet. I know it’s been 4 or 5 years already, but still. (Though I have seen other movies with him in it since.)
A friend of mine was binging his films shortly after his death. I tried to warn him that this one and The Fisher King would be too painful to watch so soon. He did not listen.
I can always watch The Fisher King. With What Dreams May Come, it’s mainly that half the movie is spent explaining and/or visually depicting the idea that suicide irrevocably dooms your soul to an eternity of mournful confusion and desperate madness (unless you happen to be one half of an impossibly rare star-crossed soul mate combo). It was a bummer in the first place. Now, it’s like, ooph.
I’m generally not a fan of rewatching movies in general, especially when it comes to longer movies. So a lot of people I know see it as insane that I’ve only seen Avengers Endgame once.
Yesss thank you! To me plot is pointless; it’s a made-up story. Characters are much more interesting to me. I’ll take a movie with a dumb plot but fun well-developed characters anyday
I’ve seen Infinity War several times but Endgame only once. Infinity War works much better as a film than Endgame which is a glorified tribute to the MCU
I don’t know if it was said in the verdammt, thrice cursed, irritating slideshow…..But Magnolia was a movie that I thought was great when I watched it. Bought the DVD, and then couldn’t bring myself to watch it again. I feel like 3 Billboards is gonna be the same.
Seven. Just too grim. Same with all of the Day After films, some of which are very good films. I’m trying to curb my habit of rewatching films generally because there’s so much I still need to see.
I’m going to have to continue to exist never having watched Salo once and satisfy myself with the intellectual point of it all—but I wanted to mention that I was in a small youtube hole of watching people pick movies from the Criterion closet and the still that previews Gaspar Noe’s visit is him holding up a copy of Salo which of course.
For me, it’s THE HORSEMAN, about a grieving dad who exacts terrible revenge upon the men involved in his daughter’s death. I found it an emotionally powerful movie, especially revelations later on, but good grief if it isn’t also draining.
Reservoir Dogs. The torture of Tim Roth’s character was so gruesome, especially when they cut-off his ear. It’s completely different from watching the cartoon violence of a superhero movie. GREAT movie, but I won’t watch it again.
I’m gonna go with Hereditary, although I’m actually not entirely sure I’m glad I saw it the first time. I’ll never, ever get THAT cut scene image out of my head.
I was somewhat disappointed in it the first go-round, largely because I saw it in a theater full of people, some of whom were laughing at the end. So I watched it again about a year ago in the privacy of my own home and was sufficiently blown away. It’s incredible. And, I would suggest, it gets better with each viewing.
I also saw it in the theater and the group I was with (the random people there) ALSO laughed basically the entire way through. (Welllllll, maybe not during a couple specific scenes. Ahem.) It was kind of a nervous laughter mostly but it fuckin’ sucked regardless.Maybe I should try a rewatch as well. I found it pretty upsetting the first time though, despite the jackassery.
I’m conflicted with that movie. It was the first movie I genuinely felt sick during and wanted to leave, because of not only the grotesque violence but the emotional terrorism throughout. (I closed my eyes for most of the ending which made things easier). But I also don’t want to watch it again because I thought it was a much smarter movie than it actually was. I enjoyed the psychological aspects of it, wondering if the characters were dealing with mental illness made worse by grief. Then I find out it’s some bizarre cult responsible for the whole thing? Nahhh I’m good, I liked it better when it was ambiguous. For instance the naked people I thought were the spirits of the family bloodline that had been tainted by this illness for generations. But nope! Random cult. For being called Hereditary it was actually not about heredity at all. It was far too literal for me to truly enjoy.
Ari Aster makes some great but difficult movies. I recall he mentioned in an interview that making Hereditary was therapeutic. You can tell he’s been through some shit because he’s so good at depicting trauma.Midsommar had a well-observed depiction of PTSD that triggered flashbacks for me. Really well done, but it’d be tough to watch that again.
Mysterious skin is the movie that comes to mind for me. I saw it many many years ago, and it utterly captivated me. It was absolutely beautiful on nearly every level, but the film was so bleak and so utterly brutal with it’s themes that it broke me to the point I will never bring myself to watch it again, but I remember the qualities so vividly.
The Dark Knight. Either I’m in a good mood and don’t want to watch something depressing or I’m not and want to watch something that makes me feel better
Little Children with Kate Winslet. Saw it a few months ago during lockdown, was a very good film, deserved all the accolades it got (especially the guy playing the child molester, who got an Oscar nom). But, really, I have no desire whatsoever to ever sit through it again.
Night and Fog.Obviously, “enjoy” is nuanced given what this film is. It’s amazing, breathtaking, and incredibly important, and I am really glad I saw it, but I could never bring myself to watch it again. I saw it when I was an undergrad, probably in 1993, as part of a “World at War” class. It was once a week, which meant it was a 3-hour class. The professor would lecture for the first part and show a film of some sort in the second part, usually a documentary.He warned us about this one, and gave people the option to nope out. But nothing he said could have prepared us for it. It’s been nearly three decades and I still can’t get it out of my head entirely.
“Eraserhead.” It really opened my eyes to the aesthetic potential of films, especially micro-budgeted ones, as well as being one of the few truly nightmarish pieces of art/entertainment I’ve ever seen. I also saw it opening night in the Detroit era and about 80% of the severely rattled audience walked out by the end. That sight alone was priceless and I smile just thinking about it. I’ve tried watching it since and it’s just not the same and that’s less a reflection on the film than on how much I’ve changed since. The visceral experience wasn’t remotely the same. I actually love watching most movies the second time more than the first. I’m more attuned to them and appreciate them so much more, they just open up for me.
I watched that with headphones on in the dark. Baddd idea. Also I can’t imagine watching that in a city or industrial area. Lynch was supposedly inspired by his stay in the industrial urban wasteland of Philadelphia in the ‘70s.
Come and see. It’s on The Criterion Channel; after having read about it and seeing the trailer I really wanted to see it, with only a vague idea of what it was about.After it was done, I had to turn off all the lights and just process what the hell I just experienced.
For me, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth, I even bought the DVD, thinking to take another go at it, but have never watched it. The combination of horror and heartbreak is just too much for me.
Right?!?!My daughter is 10 and is developing a really interesting and rather dark taste in stories and film. I showed her the (American) Pans Labyrinth trailer and she thought it was some kind of live action remake of the Bowie ‘Labyrinth’ – I have convinced her to give it a shot though.She will appreciate the stepfathers fate.
I said in high school that I’d never watch “Eraserhead” again, but that was a long, long time ago and I’ve watched it since then. It’s nowhere near as revolting once you know what you’re getting into. It’s really just well-made and sort of stupid, actually.
Moonlight is in an interesting choice, because as tough as it is, it’s quite rewatchable to me. Anyway, my favorite movie of last year is The Nightingale. I have toyed with the idea of treading the waters of torture and misanthropy and nihilism of Jennifer Kent’s revenge story, but seeing it in theaters, right up close, that film’s lodged in my brain and not going anywhere.
Sin Nombre is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s first movie, and it’s a beautifully shot, horrifying story about a Honduran girl trying to reach the U.S. and a Mexican gang member with doubts about his allegiances. I watched it with my roommates in college and we all agreed that it was really good and maybe the saddest thing we’d ever seen.
oh my god, how could anyone ENJOY “Salo”? Yes i know its a big ww2 metaphor, bla, etc. But its STILL just a bunch of children being raped and tortured on screen. I dont see how anyone could actually call it an enjoyable experience.
I’m with John Waters, in that it’s a either a beautiful art house film masquerading as Exploitation or vice versa, but either way it’s definitely it’s own thing. It’s not your typical art film, that’s for sure: but it’s so clearly better made than an exploitation film of that era. And like a lot of art films, it’s dull in parts. That end with the soldiers dancing is incredible, considering what came before.
I would say Dancer in the Dark or Breaking the Waves, but I can definitely rewatch those now that I think about it, LvT’s hijinks aside. Really, any P.T. Anderson movie: Magnolia was certainly entertaining the first time (22 year old me) but, unbearable the second go round (42 year old me). The characters all seemed to enjoy the smell of their own farts way too much, except Robards, of course.
There are many films, but I’ll just list two for positive and traumatic experience. Positive: Wild Boys of the Road. It’s a wrenching film but also has a great deal of heart and warmth, made even better by being unencumbered by many of the tropes of the “youth movie” genre (no love triangles, no romantic angst). It’s also one of the times that I would say a studio-mandated happy ending is a good idea (and Wellman doesn’t let it be too absurdly happy anyway – the final moment reminds us that amid the friendship and chance for a fresh start, some pains are permanent). Traumatic: Threads. Yes, the attack scene and aftermath is horrific, but it’s the buildup in the first hour that really stays with me – the near-constant sound of jets flying overhead, the characters struggling to hide their unease at what they fear is coming, and most of all, the anti-nuke rally that is ruined by factionalism and crushed by outside forces. That in particular was extremely hard for me watch. The numbness and helplessness of that whole first half connects way too much to where we are now and was very difficult for me to shake.
The movie “Threads”. I don’t think I’ve watched a more unnerving and terrifying film before. For a TV Film from the 80s, it did it’s job really well, in that it made me terrified as hell about possible Nuclear War, but it was so bleak. A good watch that I’ll never see it again.
The US version was “The Day After” which we were encouraged to see the night it aired by out teachers. On the plus side I remember my Father saying that we lived close enough to NYC that more than likely we’d just be obliterated in the first wave as opposed to dying of radiation.Good times.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie I believe I first saw on home media when I was about 10. Nearly 30 years later I still watch it a few times a year — and I’m still finding new things to be awed and intrigued by. The visuals alone are enough for me to want to watch it over and over again though.
I went from finding 2001 a pretentious bore with great visual effects on my first viewing as a teenager to finding it an absolutely stunning work of art that I can’t get enough of as a 42 year old. I purchased the 4k blu ray a couple years ago before I even owned a 4k television. I love it.Cinema Tyler put out a wonderful multi-part analysis/making of documentary series on Youtube about 2001 if your into behind the scenes stuff.
surprised it took this long for Dancer to be mentioned. Holy Fuck did that one stay with me for awhile.Also…”I Melt With You” .. saw it once, dont need to relive that one again.
One of the most powerful theater experiences. I will never forgot the sight of the huge and beautiful Samoan behind me. I turned to see if the audience was as devastated as I was to see this man, owning his emotions and allowing a sea of tears that illuminated him. It took the audience about five minutes to get up and leave the theater. Yet, I can watch it, and still allow myself to be immersed in the story at least once a year. The only other film that takes me away emotionally like this is West Side Story. The Anita rape scene and the Maria ending floor me everyone. Fuck those who say Natalie Wood, the brown face, or the jazz fights gender the movie. Fuck, Singing in the Rain has an Inception dance scene and nobody says that takes away from that films beauty. It’s Natalia Woods and more importantly Rita Moreno’s raw and honest performance, like Bjork’s, that turn me into an emotional messy. And for me, that’s Hollywood, baby!
The Shining.It’s fantastic. I love it. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. I even often find myself talking about it with other movie loving friends and wanting to watch it.But then I remember the old lady in the bathtub, one of the few movie moments still capable of giving me honest-to-goodness nightmares, and it’s an instant nope.
Any movie with torture porn really. Of course one that has an engaging plot as well.The remake of The Last House On The Left for example. I really enjoyed it first viewing, but don’t really care to watch it again.Now that I think about it, I feel that way about a lot of the horror remakes they’ve had. Not to say they had good plots or anything.
Meet the Feebles would be one of my answers. I bought the DVD based on its reputation and Jackson, because at the time that was the only way I had any chance of seeing it (and its frankly amazing that there was even a copy in my mall’s Camelot or whatever it was back then). I watched it with some friends, and put it back in the DVD case knowing I would never open it again. It definitely had its share of laughs and demented genius, but the whole thing is so grimy and there are so many unpleasant characters/scenes that I just don’t want to do it again. Made me feel like I needed a shower. It looks and feels like someone shooting a snuff film with puppets they found in the garbage.
Oh, I agree with you on all fronts. Especially needing to take a shower after watching it. I was an early supporter of Jackson’s films (pre-Academy bait & LOTR) and Meet The Feebles just stands out as “How in the hell could this possibly exist? Who is the audience for this despicable piece of cinema?”Turns out it’s me and a couple of other people. And, yes, I do actually take a shower after watching it.
I have many films on the good or great but never again list.Top for me is not 2001, but another Kubrick film: A Clockwork Orange.Not as great, but still a very good film with several outstanding performances is Silence of the Lambs.It isn’t the violence or even the nihilism per se, because I can watch No Country for Old Men multiple times. There is just something deeply disturbing and off-putting about both of those films. A sense of desecration, perhaps. That somehow they are transmitting the human stain as much as examining it.Obviously this is purely personal and subjective. I know many who feel the same way about my exception (No Country)
I’ve seen pretty polarized reactions to No Country as well (one of my favourite movies), which frankly confuse me, since I didn’t find it very gratuitous, and I’m usually bothered or annoyed enough by that in movies to the point of not enjoying them. I find there’s a difference between depicting cruelty to be observed, and depicting it to be enjoyed, or as a lazy stand-in for character or plot development (This is mostly a fun movie, but let’s establish that the bad guy is bad by having him slowly and brutally murder one of his own for some small transgression, etc. Cue to black, and back to the funny!)
Bergman’s “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Winter Light” both of which are incredible and very depressing. And while I know he’s a pariah on these boards, Woody Allen’s Interiors is a great one off cause MAN is that his Bergman film.And best of all, no Allen in it.
Aranofsky’s Mother!If you have boundary issues – from growing up with a parent who inappropriately overshared, never gave you any privacy, and used you to meet their emotional needs – it’s almost unbearable.I can’t count how many times I’ve had anxiety nightmares that almost directly mimic scenes in that movie.
I feel like most people say something like Requiem for a Dream which makes me feel weird that I rewatched it so much. I’m realizing the past few Kaufman movies give me that kind of feeling which is odd since there’s so much you can catch on the rewatch but I end up just reading everything online and then completely forgetting the plot after a few days. Meanwhile I consider The Squid and the Whale so painfully uncomfortable and yet I keep coming back to it all the time.
I have made this kind of “I’ll never watch it again” statement before, but I never really mean it. I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream at least three times. Sure it’s emotionally draining, but it’s so damn well made.The closest I’ve come to actually not re-watching is with Inland Empire, which I have still yet to watch a second time. And that’s because I feel like I’ve ruined the magic of some other Lynch films by watching them so many damn times that no part surprises me anymore.
Amistad was just too cruel and heartbreaking.Death Wish: the rape scene at the beginning of the movie was so fucking brutal, even for 1974. I’ve never watched it again.
Oh man, Bastard Out of Carolina. It’s less about the movie itself, and more about what it meant to me. I was a kid when I stumbled across it on TV late one night, still reeling from having been molested, and I sat and watched this movie about this little kid experiencing far worse abuse, but surviving it in the end. I looked up info about the movie and found out that it was based on a book and the book was semi-autobiographical in nature, which to me meant that I could tell people what happened, and they would know, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world.I’ve never gone back to revisit it, and the critical consensus indicates that my memory of it being a good movie with strong performances holds true, so that’s good enough for me.
I can’t scroll the comments on these slideshows (*side-eyes the powers*), so maybe someone has said this – The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. So amazingly visceral, I just cannot see subjecting myself to its violence again.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Absolutely gorgeously, incredible acting, fantastic soundtrack (two Tom Waits songs!), and superb editing – and I don’t think I will ever be able to watch it again.
(In contrast, I’ll see Schindler’s List exactly one more time, and that’s when I’ll show it to my kids. As a Jew, it’s just too painful to see otherwise.)
I don’t know if documentaries count, but Dear Zachary is far and away the winner for me. It’s a riveting & important story, but so devastating- I was crying so hard that both eyes and nose were waterfalls.
I kept scrolling and scrolling the comments waiting for this one to pop up. I was watching it alone late at night and at a particular moment my body let out an involuntary and inhuman groan followed by some intense full body sobbing the likes of which I’d never experienced before or since. Usually I’m more of a stoic, single-tear-down-the-cheek crier, but the combination of sadness and outrage did me in.
It is so hard to watch. I’m pretty sure my nose was running as hard as my tears were.I think it’s a great indicator of how there’s a lot of issues with Canada that gets disregarded and needs fixing. We import a lot of news and media from the US, and viewing the discombobulated monstrosity that is the US government and society tends to make us think we’re structured so much better than the States- even if we are in several ways, we’re not nearly as good as we think.
Paranormal Activity 1 & 2. Saw both in the theater on respective opening weekends; both were incredibly enjoyable, but experiences that relied so much on the collective big-screen haunted house vibe, that would be impossible to replicate at home. Under The Skin. Absolutely floored me sideways, loved it. And there is no way I’m watching that scene on the beach again. And then the second one. Devastating. There’s also a subset of movies that you once enjoyed but which are rendered impossible by revelations about those involved. The Usual Suspects springs to mind, what with Spacey & Singer being human crap sacks.
I first saw The Usual Suspects in college around 2006, and blame my expectations. As a child, I remember hearing some endorsement of, “If you can solve this one, we’ve got a job for you down at the local precinct!” which I never took literally, but always took seriously for the challenge of solving it. It’s no secret that the big reveal – while cinematic – is a huge cheat on the concept of following clues, as they’re all shown to the viewer after the fact. That didn’t ruin it, but it was mostly what I took from it, given my personal hype. I did, however, pretty much always think Kevin Spacey was a smug, pompous asshole, so I guess there’s that.
2001 has to be the all time winner for me. I didn’t like it when I saw it in the theater at all. I just found it tedious, but pretty, like a more serious Star Trek:TMP. I’ve seen it twice since, and both times, I swore it would be the last. I liked the book well enough though. Runners up are the M.Night Shamalan epics I saw on dates. If I could have, I would have walked on Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense. Both of them made me very interested in looking at my watch over and over again. Always the sign of a stinker.
I knew going into it the reputation, but I just a few days ago watched The Nightingale. It was really one of those things that I’m glad I watched, and many parts of it were actually really beautiful (the ending scene, the rolling shots of Tasmanian jungle, etc), and also sort of educational for me (growing up in US public schools, we didn’t really learn anything about the Black War – hell, we barely touched on the Korean War and we were in that one) but… yeah, I can see why people at Cannes were walking out in the first ten minutes.
Man Push Cart (2005) – Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) is a Pakistani-born cart vendor who sells bagels and coffee in Manhattan, a humble and bleak means of a living that affords him little comfort. In his former life in Pakistan, he was a rock star. He was also married and had a child. Now his wife is dead, his in-laws refuse him visits with his son, and his job is all he seems to have, but he seems content with his fate. However, a chance encounter with a businessman may change Ahmad’s fortune — for better, or worse.Great film but BLEAK. AS. FUCK.i don’t go to the cinema for reality.
Fire Walk With Me is a good one for this category. I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks in order to at some point watch the 3rd series but realised that FWWM is meant to be the ‘prequel’ to the whole thing. So I considered watching then but then was I like nah.
When I’m bored and scrolling through the cable guide, I notice that Saving Private Ryan gets shown a lot, which calls to mind what a stressful experience it was to see it in the theater. The death scene of Adam Goldberg’s character was particularly upsetting for me. I steadfastly refuse to watch another minute of it.
Now I feel I should reevaluate many of my life choices since the mentioned movies in the comments here are a significant part of my regular rewatch rotation.
Blue Valentine. Great writing and acting. I liked seeing the contrast between youthful hope for the future and then finding out that it all fell apart as time passed. I liked seeing the kind of dumpy jobs they fell into once they couldn’t rest on the artsy idealism of the hustle. But it was also a weirdly unrewarding viewing experience that just made me feel BAD without digging deeper into the lived situation.
I almost never want to rewatch any movie. It’s rare that I want to spend time re-experiencing something that I’ve already experienced, especially in this Age of Content. But I doubly hate rewatching horror movies. They just never feel the same the second time through. You see the seams more easily. For instance, I tried watching Hereditary again recently, and…eh.
Irreversible by Gaspar Noe. Very well shot, Intriguing concept (how things can start off simple and go way the fuck off the rails) and good reverse storytelling. But just… brutal and explicit. A horrific rape scene. Liked It but… nope, never again.
I walked away from The Rise of Skywalker having enjoyed it, but knowing with a certainty that if I saw it again, I wouldn’t be able to ignore its obvious terribleness.
Uncut Gems is a good choice. But I;m going to go with Grave of the Fireflies. It’s about a brother and sister trying to survive on their own in Kobe during and shortly after WW2.
Mysterious Skin. It destroyed me. I only watched it a second time because a friend thought it might help her cope with the same tragedy as that of the two main protagonists (it did) and she didn’t want to watch it alone. It’s an important film full of powerful performances that I don’t think I could handle a third time.
I know the answer to this because I got talked into seeing it a second time and heavily regretted it. The Revenant. Movie has incredible cinematography and it kept me in awe the entire time I first saw the movie. The second time, I focused more on the runtime and plot and it did not work nearly as well. Still think it’s a great movie but never want to see it again.
American Beauty, saw it in the theatre and really enjoyed it but whenever I have a chance to see it again, I take a pass. Same with Monster’s Ball, maybe because it was so heartbreaking but once was enough.
Reading these comments I thought of an experiment: Watch a movie and then watch it again right after. In a theater, buy a ticket for the next showing. Of course people do this quite a bit for a movie they love, but do it for a movie that was difficult to sit through or a movie you didn’t particularly like. You’re not going to get the same emotional reaction if any from a second viewing that close to the first. I watched Saving Private Ryan with a friend and that night my parents wanted to see it and I tagged along. I didn’t feel much. But this probably isn’t a general response for all movies you immediately re-see. I guess my point is that length of time between viewings is very important. Too soon or too late the magic of the experience is gone.
Mine would be 1981 West German film Christiane F. The vivid drug scenes, withdrawals, OD’s and child sex workers were far too disturbing. Great soundtrack though. IMO
One I can’t really watch again is the original Sleuth, because the whole film is so dependent on a suprise twist that it looses much of it’s impact the second time. The first time around was a heck of a ride, though.
Elephant was seen as opportunistic at the time, but its held up as the best cinematic comment on the phenomena of school shootings, and for me is one of Gus’s last truly brilliant works. Also, and I hate to say this about such a cruel and violent film, it’s filmed gorgeously.
Buried. It’s a brilliant movie, and I’m glad I saw it, and I recommend it for career-best Ryan Reynolds, but by all the fucks in Fuckington, I’ll never be able to handle going back there.
THE DEAD DON’T DIE was like that, I enjoyed it well enough but between the fourth-wall taps (and eventual break) and the sorta… pointlessness of it all, I thought well that was a fun little exercise in character, dialogue and performance, and I don’t care if I ever see it again.
On the plus side, I didn’t have to pay for it beyond the time spent, so that adds a bit of goodwill to my viewing experience.
A likely controversial take, but Salo should not be on this list. That film has so many different layers and subplots (the interests/motivations/conformities/plights of the various tiers of characters, most notably) that are impossible to absorb in one viewing. If you’re put off by the style and Pasolini’s confrontational style in the film, then honestly I’d say it’s not even worth sticking around to the end of 1 viewing. The typical modern response for audiences seeing it for the first time tend to find the film tame and don’t understand its lore as a shocker. For those, I absolutely recommend a 2nd viewing to focus less on the Libertines and their motivations, and instead on everyone else’s. It’s a *far* more conventional (and frankly, great) film when that element is considered.Plus, for the well-read or adventurous out there, viewing through the lens of the opening Bibliography (Klossowski, Barthes, etc.) gets you closer to the frame which Pasolini chose to place his anger.
The Pianist (but not due to the squick factor that is Roman Polanski).I’ve only seen it once, but I feel like the whole movie is burned into my psyche, particularly the execution scene when the Nazi officer has to reload his gun while the guy on the ground just lies there waiting to die. Ugh.
Both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Though I have gone back and watched clips from both movies. These movies should really be required viewing by… everyone. Especially Americans who said “Never again” after we found out what was going on in concentration camps in Europe in WWII.Imagine if Hitler had not only won the war, but was still in power, and was a celebrity, who bragged and glorified and like… got choked up with pride… about all the indiscriminate killing. That’s how it is in Indonesia, on a slightly smaller scale. Just fucking unbelievable. There’s really no way of attacking this subject in a sober documentary. That’s why there are surrealist elements in it. Not unlike Night and Fog (1956).
Hmmm…none recently, but 12 YEARS A SLAVE stands out. Fantastically crafted and acted film, but hot damn if it didn’t just make me feel all sick inside. Though I was riveted by it when I first saw it, I knew immediately afterwards that I’d never see it again. In fact, I said just that to my brother who saw it with me. He agreed.
A ton of things from my childhood, like “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” (1981) or “Invaders from Mars” (1986). Kid me loved them, but adult me knows why you’ve never seen them shown on any channel.
Schindler’s List, partially because of how people in my class reacted to it when we saw it in school. I was the only Jewish kid in class, and a handful of the other kids reacted as if the death scenes were funny, or by telling me they thought Liam Neeson was in a Nazi uniform*, and because the Nazi uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss, I must not ‘get’ high fashion because I didn’t find them kinky.
People also laughed at Hotel Rwanda in the same class, but it was at a scene that was arguably meant to be funny on purpose, albeit in a very dark way (the scene where the kid comes in covered in blood, but none of it is his).
*(Had they been saying this about him in, say, Nell or The Phantom Menace, I wouldn’t have had an issue with it.)
I saw 2001 many, many times, and read books about its making. I do NOT want to see again two films: Ichi the Killer and A Serbian Film, thank you no thank you.
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I mean — can I just put the entire Michael Haneke oeuvre?
I was actually going to rewatch Amour around the time everyone was collating their Best of the Decade lists, but then my Grandma died of dementia and I just decided it was too raw a subject. Maybe one day I’ll revisit it, but not for a while.
I just subscribed to the Criterion Channel and I have been pussyfooting around Michael Haneke’s films. I’m intrigued but from what I’ve read on this site, I’m trying to build up courage and decide which one to start with. I know they are all gonna be challenging.
And Gaspar Noe while you’re at it. And maybe Lars Von Trier.
Yeah, I really liked Melancholia, but I’ll never watch it again.
GIRLS, Europa. That one deserves many rewatches. It is absolutely amazing to behold.
Oh man it’s been so long since I’ve seen Europa that I barely remember it. I’ll have to make some time. I still think Breaking the Waves is astonishing. I’ve watched that a few times, and I always end up emotionally gutted.
I’ve watched Funny Games a few times. There’s something so captivating about its vicious emptiness that pulls me back.
I watched Code Inconnu white a few times and I like it more with each rewatch. It is technically amazing and it makes its point clearly.
Black Swan.I don’t if I was just in the perfect mood, or it was just the right time in my life, but I actually said outloud, “holy shit, that was a great movie,” when the credits started rolling. The movie made sense to me in a way that I could never describe. It was like my mind woke up, took in and swallowed everything, and then shut the door. That was 10 years ago.Since then, I’ve never once considered rewatching this movie. I can’t risk losing the feeling I had when I watched it. A feeling I know was a once in a blue moon deal. It’s not worth it.
It was this movie (as was Shattered Glass for Hayden Christensen), that made me realize that Natalie Portman actually is talented. She just had terrible material to work with in the prequels and so looked like a bad actress.
I mean except for those prequel movies she’s pretty much always been great from the very beginning.
Christensen’s performance in “Shattered Glass” completely blindsided me. I watched the movie on a win because I knew the story and also Hank Azaria and Chloë Sevigny, but then BOOM! ACTING!I had pretty much the same reaction seeing Robert Pattinson in “Cosmopolis.”
Sarsgaard was great in that too.“I didn’t do anything wrong, Chuck!”“I really wish you’d STOP SAYING THAT!”
Love that. He’s just so completely fed up with the BS at that point.
The thing is, all the qualities that made him annoying as Anakin (which was sadly not helped by the dialogue written for him)—the whininess, petulance, and insecurity—were perfect for Stephen Glass—who was annoying, but he was supposed to be annoying.
I don’t think Portman’s always great, but she excels with a director who will draw her out (so, uh, not Lucas).
I used to think she was great, but yeah, she was quite bad in Star Wars. I also don’t think she did very well in the Thor movies.
it’s the exact opposite. portman can only play one type, the mousey quiet girl, and when asked to play that will do well. everything else she is terrible at.
Ah, you weren’t impressed by Vox Lux either (although I don’t think Portman’s acting is the problem with that).
I think she was asked to be kind of affectless in the prequels. Hard to say if the result we got was her not being up to the task or poor direction. Probably both.
Odd. I had he exact opposite reaction to Natalie Portman’s acting abilities after watching Black Swan: “holy shit, it’s not the material at all – she’s actually just a legit, terrible actor.”
It doesn’t really hold up on repeat viewings, honestly.
I know it won’t. It was never about the actual movie, it’s about more than that. Black Swan just happened to be the catalyst of something greater than itself in that moment. The way you remember the movie that was playing at the theater when a girl first let you put your hand up her shirt, or the song on the radio when you’re driving to the hospital for your kid’s birth, that’s closer to how I remember this movie. It’s not about the actual product, but the context in which you experienced it that gives it its value.
I appreciated the movie much more the second time I watched it. The first viewing I thought it was pretty-trash.
I’m sorry, did you think I wanted your opinion on anything?
You could always leave and never come back
No u
I felt exactly the same way about “Mulholland Drive” the first time I saw it, exactly, like my mind opened up and took it – like my whole being took it in. I didn’t have any desire to see it again for about twenty years, because I didn’t want to affect that experience. Finally I did, when it played at a revival theater and I realized I was tired of being the only one of my friends who had seen it. So I recommended it to them (and they know I never, ever recommend movies), and we all went together and now we’ve all seen it and I’m not so alone.
Just gonna remind everyone that there was a comic tie-in to 2001: A Space Odyssey written and drawn by Jack Kirby.And this tie-in is canon with Marvel continuity as issue 8 introduced Aaron Stack, aka Machine Man, who would later be incorporated into the Marvel Universe.
sometimes i think about how there’s a pretty direct line between Stanley Kubrick and this:and it really weirds me out
Is that Morbius in the background?
yeah, it’s from Marvel Zombies 3 apparently. never actually read it
It was pretty fun. Teamed him up with Howard the Duck.
MZ3 is easily the best of the Marvel Zombies material.
Yeah, I know Kirkman gets most of the credit for it, but 3 is where I felt it started living up to its premise, especially after the snoozefest that was 2. Fred Van Lente really opened it up.
Convenient chainsaw placement.
Marvel has a history of incorporating licensed tie-ins for various properties with the Marvel Universe. Like the time the Seventh Doctor dropped off an alien robot bounty hunter on top of the then home of the Fantastic Four.And Death’s Head is fully owned by Marvel and has made occasional cameos in other comics and even recently got his own mini series. His very existence means that The Doctor, or at least a version of them, exists in the Marvel Universe.
Warren Ellis’ Nextwave series was a classic that featured Machine Man among other minor Marvel heroes. Always worth a reading.
Despite the fact that Warren Ellis is a goatlicker, it is still a good story. But knowing that Ellis coerced women into having sex with him under the guise of mentorship only to drop them like a proverbial sack of potatoes gives a lot of his work a bad taste in my mouth.
Still hoping he shows up in a future Guardians of the Galaxy or The Eternals.
There was also a novel tie in written by Arthur C Clark(who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick) that explains a lot of information that seems to be missing (famously much of the dialogue in 2001 was cut by Kubrick). I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of the film
Right. Fun fact: the screenplay is credited to “Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke” and the novel to “Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick”.
The film and novel were written basically simultaneously. That’s why there are a lot of discrepancies between the two.
Those look like they really channel the spirit of the film.
Gee. I don’t remember that monster with the tentacles.
Yeah the first 8 issues are more of an anthology series and, outside of The Monolith and the Star Child, there’s no direct connection movie.
Guess you haven’t seen the Director’s Cut.
wow, that’s cool. thanks.
I owned the first 3 issues as a kid and was quite weirded out by them. They make quite a bit more sense as an adult
I think Schindler’s List is a pretty obvious pick. It’s an important movie that I’m glad I saw. But it’s so depressing that it’s really hard to re-watch.Also, the funny thing about 2001 is that I’ve seen it twice. The first time was when I was a kid and the ending gave me nightmares. The second time was when I was much older and I had seen 2010: The Year We Make Contact and read the books. It honestly gave the 2001 a huge re-watch value the second time around.
Thing about Schindler’s List, it so often shows how much joy Spielberg takes in crafting cinema, not only in the jokey scenes with Schindler hiring his secretaries, but even in the most horrific set pieces. Take the machine-gun strobe lights and ragtime piano during the liquidation of the ghetto. It’s so clever and joyfully crafted, it’s upsettingly enjoyable to watch. Compare to The Pianist, which feels so miserable and nightmarish, I can’t imagine ever going back to it again.
Yes, I have watched Schindler’s List a number of times, for this exact reason. It is just so beautifully made that, despite being extremely depressing, it still awakens something in me every time I watch it, like a kind of catharsis generator.
Ebert always said that no good movie is depressing. I think Schindler’s List supports that. It’s about horrific subject matter, but so skillfully made that I have watched it more than once. I feel like no matter what a movie is about, the point of watching it is to enjoy yourself. If I don’t have some sort of emotional catharsis watching it, I’m not even sure I want to see it once, let alone multiple times.
Good point. It seems you can engage with difficult material more if it’s told in an inventive way, as opposed to bland verité where you’re just wanting it to be over. No-one wants to wallow in misery *that* much
The fade from the Schindler Jews approaching the nearby town for the first time to their descendants walking the same field wrecks me every single damn time. You’ve watched this incredible story of hope amidst the worst of human cruelty for three hours, knowing all along it’s a true story, but to be reminded that these real people – survivors, children, grandchildren – only exist because of what you’ve just watched is something that never loses its potency.
Perfectly put.
I’d never really thought about how this “coda” to Schindler’s list is structurally similar to the “coda” of Private Ryan. But both force us to confront the most difficult thing about the movie we just watched (while reminding is it’s not just a movie).SL reminds us. This. Was. Real.PR isn’t just asking about Ryan himself, but the whole war. Was all the death and suffering worth it?
If you want a real mind-fuck, read the book it is based on.If anything, Spielberg actually underplayed and understated what Schindler actually did, because what he did, repeatedly, and over the entire war, was so damn implausible that no one would ever believe it, but the author Kinneally interviewed multiple people to verify everything. The details of the deceptions Schindler engaged in were so audacious and frankly, preposterous, it staggers the mind. He engages in Trump-levels of flattery, bullshit and gaslighting constantly, for years, and people just believe him, or if they dont – and they often dont – they play along anyway because they like him.
I think that Spielberg did the ‘joyful’ bits deliberately first to just set up a dichotomy between mood and image and second so the bits that were not ‘jolly’ would stand out.The face of the Nazi throwing dug up bodies on the fire.The avalanche of bodies that includes the pink-coated girl.I saw the film when it premiered in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 and never since, and I cannot get it out of my head.
That was one of the facets of the movie that I had struggled with years ago. I didn’t quite understand what he was after – with some of the more mass-appeal bits of humor, music-video style editing, and sentimentality here and there – esp the “I could have done more” cry-fest. Certainly, the sum of the movie overrides these concerns, and one just has to remember that Spielberg is used to doing these sorts of things for his other movies.
I would be fine living my life without being emotionally destroyed by Requiem for a Dream again. Amazing film but I can’t do that one again. I tried once years later and gave up about 25 minutes in. I could do it if forced, but not willingly. However, if you haven’t seen it you should watch it once, but expect sadness. Kids dir by Larry Clark could also qualify.
It’s a strange wording (the article title, not yours) to say one “enjoyed” a movie like Requiem for a Dream. Respected, moved by, yes, but not really “enjoyed”.
One does not “enjoy” Requiem For A Dream as much as one “experiences”
it. I love it, but I couldn’t tell you the next time I plan on watching it. Or 12 Years A Slave either.
Requiem is in my top ten list. A really amazing movie. And extremely visceral and tough to watch.
I can listen to that soundtrack forever, but I cannot watch that movie again.
One of the permanent effects of that movie is that I can’t listen to that lovely soundtrack without starting to sweat and feel nauseous.
Saw it in the theater and was shaking through most if it. Have not watched it again.Kids was definitely a one-off for me. I would put forward Todd Solondz’s Happiness and Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors as also un-rewatchable.
I have only seen Happiness back in the day when IFC actually showed real indie and foreign films that were of quality. It was late at night and I was half asleep and kept wondering if the movie was real or if I was dreaming. His favorite film for me is Palindromes and yet I’ve only been able to see it once cause it’s impossible to stream and way expensive to purchase the dvd.
I love Happiness, but it is the very definition of Not For Everyone.
And shit, I’ll say this – Hereditary is a masterpiece of contemporary horror that I, a huge lifetime fan of the genre, will never subject myself to again. I can think of few other horror films that are just so relentlessly cruel. It hurts me to think of that film.
Thank you. I have almost watched that one so many times. The description just sounds so grim, like Leaving Las Vegas grim and I can’t go on that trip again. I don’t need more nightmares.
I opened this article only to write about Requiem, and here you are.My friend has an uncle, he’s an addict (and was a drug dealer, was sentenced to jail for it), she said to me that this movie glorified addiction and that’s why she didn’t like it, but I did, imo it was totally opposite of glorification and romantization.
First film I thought of when I read the headline. It’s amazing but the ending(s) are too grim for me. I am glad I saw it and would recommend it to someone emotionally tough but I won’t watch it again.
Requiem for a Dream was the very first movie I thought of when I saw the headline.I remember watching it with some friends in a dorm room my freshman year of college. The movie ended and we all walked out of the room silent. No one really knew what to say.
I hear that a lot about that movie.
I have a friend who likes to take mushrooms with people who haven’t seen it and put it on halfway through. He is well on his way to becoming a serial killer.
Kids was one of the very first movies that came to my mind when I saw the headline. I saw Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer around the same tame and it absolutely belongs on the list. Rooker is absolutely mesmerizing and as much as I love his work in general, I don’t think he ever topped that performance.
I dunno. I think Michael Rooker’s performance in Eight Men Out is fantastic.Instead of playing the underbiter “Huuurrrr, you think you’re better than me?” angry redneck that became his bread and butter, he plays this suave confident, eloquent, intelligent individual who is just so charming as a 1920’s swell. It’s great.
That whole movie is great, and you’re spot-on about Rooker’s performance. One of the great baseball movies.
This is a very common answer to this question, and while I understand that reaction, I revisit the film fairly often for a few reasons. The score is one of my very favorites, and I find the filmmaking so kinetic and energizing, that rather than leaving me drained, the film leaves me on a high. The subject matter is portrayed in such a bombastic manner, that I’m never all that affected by it (I find The Wrestler to be an infinitely harder watch as far as Aranofsky is concerned because unlike Requiem, everything is played so realistically). Really it strikes me as operatic more than anything, especially during that big climax with all the inter cutting between the different character stories. And I love Ellen Burstyn’s performance, my favorite of hers.
I remember this review. It kind of nails that one for me.https://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/09/review.requiem.dream/
From that hysterical review, this is comedy gold:
“Requiem for a Dream” could be considered offensive by human beings.
Leto has a pus-filled, infected track mark on his arm. Connelly vomits
directly into the camera lens. People snort, smoke, and inject
anything they can get their hands on. Wayans is shown having sex with
his nude girlfriend. A drug dealer gets shot point-blank in the face.
And, of course, Burstyn gets snapped at by her refrigerator. In this
case, torrents of profanity can be viewed as a welcome relief. Rated
NC-17. 102 minutes.
I’ve deliberately avoided Trainspotting for similar reasons.
Trainspotting is so much less intense than Requiem for a Dream. It has some disturbing visuals but it at least has a sense of humor. Requiem is just brutal.
Trainspotting is very different from Requiem in that Trainspotting allows humor and excitement into its world. Also the soundtrack for Trainspotting can be fun and propulsive at times (I used to jam out to the soundtrack regularly), whereas Requiem’s score is all sadness, tension and intensity. Honestly, Trainspotting only has a few scenes that might qualify as upsetting or disturbing, other than the general anxiety anytime Robert Carlyle’s (non-junkie) character is on-screen because he can turn violent at any moment. I’ve re-watched Trainspotting a number of times and never had the desire to re-watch Requiem. I thought Requiem was well done, but its full of basically anti-drug-propaganda-levels of constant horror and pain for all its characters.
My problem with both films was that I thought every single featured character in both of them were unrepentant scumbags, who if I knew in real life, I would avoid like the plague. The only one who elicited any empathy was Jennifer Connelly’s character, given where she ends up and what she ends up doing to support herself, and even then my response was still ‘what did you fucking expect to happen, you idiot?’Yah, junkies need help and should get it. These junkies were also all assholes.Think anyone from Trainspotting wasn’t? They kill a baby through neglect, and none of them give a shit for more than two minutes. Even Ewan McGregors character, despite having nightmares about it, really doesn’t show any waking upset. His big revelation from the event was figuring out who the father was, based on which of his friends got most (momentarily) upset.By the end, I was rooting for the heroin to kill all of them.
Cannot do the baby scene in Trainspotting ever, ever again.
I know Requiem would be the top comment.I watched it with my roomate who’s mother was a drug addicted prostitute. After that movie my roomate went into a weeklong depression and didn’t leave bed for a week. It’s a powerful movie whether or not you consider it good or bad.
I remember gripping the armrests of my seat in the theater forcing myself to finish the film, feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I saw the film alone and it was so fucking intense. When it ended, I made a b-line from the theater to my car and turned the radio on loud so I could have anything else in my brain for a few minutes.
I actually have Requiem on BluRay. For some reason I was compelled to re-watch it over and over again one summer. You do eventually lose the depression and can appreciate it for the filmmaking skill and astonishingly good performances. It helps if you watch it with director commentary, which is funny as hell and includes a story about . . .
——SPOILERS——
. . . . writers from Fangoria visiting the set while they were filming the scene when Jared Leto gets his arm chopped off. In order to impress them, they turned the blood machine ALL THE WAY UP, so when the saw hits Leto’s fake arm, the ENTIRE SET was immediately drenched in blood.
I wanna say, as a huge horror fan, why was Fangoria on set? But then it occurs to me that yes, Requiem is one of the most disturbing and scariest horror films ever made.
I think Fangoria was just a fan of Aranofsky, since this was his follow-up to Pi.
I immediately thought of Requiem as well as The Accused. Great movies that I will never watch again.
The Accused. That’s one I don’t want to see ever again. Jodie Foster was great that film, but the rape scene – with everyone just looking on – was very difficult to sit through. I’ve never seen Requiem for a Dream; however, I just watched the trailer (long version) and, although I love anything Ellen Burstyn is in, I might have to give that one a miss. Horrifying.
I took a first date to see Requiem for a Dream when it first hit theaters. Big mistake. True story.
Requiem is the first movie that popped into my head. Good, but I d0n’t need to see again.
Omg, I have no reason to post now. ^^all of this!!
Bully falls under this category. It’s a great film, in my opinion, but fuck it is NOT entertaining, but deeply upsetting in a million ways.
I saw that in the theatre while extremely hung over. It was a bad call.
Same to both. Enjoyed both of them very much; never need to see either again.
A Clockwork Orange. I saw the movie when I was way pretty young (around 13 or 14, so probably too young) and even then I knew that the movie’s vision of humanity was too dark and depressing for me to ever want to sit through it again. If only it included that final chapter that Kubrick left out.
I think that it was a good decision to leave it out; you can argue that Alex is a product of his society and not entirely to blame for his actions, but he’s a nasty piece of work; the idea that a psychopath like him would suddenly decide to become “good” out of his own free will doesn’t seem very plausible. The story works better without this “revelation”.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I think the last way I’d describe his transformation is as an act of free will. He’s mentally tortured into being physically repulsed by violence. And at the end he’s decided to go right back.
We’re talking about the end of the book, not the movie. In the book, after being cured of the brainwashing, Alex decides to be good and refrain from ultraviolence out of his own free will. In the movie, it’s presumed that he will go back to his old ways, which makes more sense. The book can only really be understood in terms of the author’s Christian beliefs — in which being good by brainwashing isn’t really being good, but true repentance is.
What criminal, exactly, has ever been made to “be good” via brainwashing?? That’s my problem with both the book and the movie. Maybe there are some incidents of such a thing occurring – even though we’ve never heard of them – but it sure as shit isn’t some sweeping movement that’s been trying to rob mankind of its free will. The movie is like a grotesque satire about something that, in reality, isn’t even an issue. But Kubrick sure seemed convinced, and he was awful good at convincing people he was thinking on a deeper level than they were. (That said, I’ve watched “Dr. Strangelove” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” about ten times apiece.)
Well obviously, none. The “Ludovico technique” is pure fiction, although it featured some ideas like subliminal messages that were actually taken seriously at the time of its writing. I guess the topical nature for Kubrick wasn’t really the brainwashing but the rise of youth violence, which was a real issue in the US and UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
Got it – it’s been ages since I read it. I do agree that the movie ending makes more sense.
They’ve confused the film with the novel. The novel ends with Alex leading a new gang, but feeling bored with a life as a thug and deciding to make a change. When Grove Press bought the rights to A Clockwork Orange they decided to cut that final chapter much to Anthony Burgess’ chagrin. Kubrick based his script on the American edition.
When Grove lost the rights to the novel, a revised edition with the original final chapter was released by W.W. Norton. That’s they version that’s still in print today and it includes a scathing foreword by Burgess regarding the omission of the final chapter.
Burgess was interested in the idea of free-will, so the novel initially contains the Ludovico technique violating that, and then in the last chapter Alex changing in a more natural way.
You have to remember the genesis of A Clockwork Orange is Burgess’ pregnant wife being viciously assaulted by a group of American soldiers during WWII, leading to her miscarriage and (although she wasn’t killed in the immediate aftermath) the alcoholism that would ultimately take her life. So I think that ending (someone who has committed atrocities being able to change) may have held some kind of therapeutic importance to Burgess.
I think there’s a decent argument for leaving it out, but his change isn’t supposed to be “sudden”. Instead he’s aging out of something.
Aw, that’s too bad. There’s a lot going on in that movie. It really rewards repeated viewings. Not going to argue that it’s cheery.
When I was in college I went to a late-night screening of A Clockwork Orange at the campus theater. Not only seeing it, but actually winning a door-prize DVD copy of the film.Which I have never watched since.
I agree with you on that one. I was also very young, around 12 or so, when I saw that film and it was very disturbing. I’ve never had any desire to watch it again, in spite of the fact that it’s relatively tame by today’s standards.
My problem with Kubrick is that he is able to make great points about architecture and oppression, but then he fucks it up with what he considers to be oppressive or elite music. Brutalism as violence? Yeah. Bloody singing in the rain? Or the music cues in The Shining or 2001? Stanley, man, read more essays about music.Anyway, all his movies are rewatchable at least for those aesthetic choices.
I finally got to see it about thirty years after it first came out, and I agree. As much as I love Kubrick (2001 is one of the few films I’ll watch in a theatre whenever I can), A Clockwork Orange is too bleak and too brutal for me to summon up any enthusiasm to watch again.
Same here. I’m not planning on watching that movie ever again. My main reason is that I can’t stand any movie or TV show that make criminals look cool.
Grave of the FirefliesIt is the only war movie I’ve ever seen that doesn’t glorify war in any way. To quote the film critic Ernest Rister (by way of Roger Ebert), “It is the most profoundly human animated film I’ve ever seen.” Even thinking about it now, 20 years later, it still hurts.
Just even the premise of Grave of the Fire makes me want to cry.
I believe I first heard about Grave of the Fireflies in the comments here, marketed to me as the ‘saddest animated movie ever’ or thereabouts. I thought I’d be my own judge of that, and sure enough, yeah, pretty much.
I learned about this movie here, on an incredibly similar list to this one. Still haven’t wracked up the nerve to watch it.
I remember being able to see it in full on YouTube, at least then. It’s definitely worth a watch. Sad, of course, but it isn’t the kind of wrenching, soul-blackening fare that I’ve heard described as ‘misery porn’, etc. It’s interesting seeing Japanese animation in the 1980s and how it compares to its American counterpart at the time as well.
“wind in the willows” comes close. similiar topic as well
It’s the only anime film I’d recommend to anyone.
Check out Barefoot Gen.
Yup. This was the film I was going to post as well. That movie absolutely wrecked me after my first and only viewing about 15 years ago. I’m glad I saw it and I thought it was amazing and I think everyone should watch it at least once but once is enough.
Side note. I used to correspond with Ernest Rister on the IGN movie/dvd message boards in the early 2000’s. Really cool guy. His Ebert connection gave him serious nerd cred on the boards lol.
It’s the only Takahata that many people have watched for some reason, while his work is full of wonderful humanistic animes as Heidi. I still cannot understand that canon, where if you want to check some Takahata, check that kinda exploitative children suffering anime.
One thousand times yes on this. It’s the first movie I thought of. I saw it about ten years ago, in a theatre and it was really good and I’m glad I did. But never ever ever again.
For me, its probably Schindler’s List, My Beautiful Laundrette, and God’s Own Country. I watched SL in like 9th grade because my history teacher gave us the assignment “watch a holocaust movie” for homework. There’s a scene where they’re forcing the prisoners to build the camps and this woman, a jewish civil engineer tells them that they’re building the base wrong and that they have to do it again or the whole thing will collapse; The head nazi has her executed, shot in the head; he then has them do what she said. My older sister is a civil engineer, and that scene still haunts me to this day. That movie prompted me to do a lot of research into the holocaust and fascism and I’m grateful for that, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again.My Beautiful Laundrette is the first movie I ever felt represented in. When I was maybe 14 or 15, I waited until I knew I’d be home alone for the night, and then watched it on an incognito tab on my computer. Watching a gay, Pakistani man be the main character in a movie who is complex and three-dimensional, and who ends the movie alive and happy, is something I never thought I’d see. It made me feel real, like I actually existed and wasn’t completely isolated in my experiences. He even ended up with a young Daniel Day Lewis! However, there are a lot of not-so-good reviews for that movie, and I definitely look back at it with rose-coloured glasses. I’d rather not watch it again and be disappointed with it. It’ll stay as a happy, nostalgic memory.God’s Own Country felt profound and extremely emotional for me for similar reasons to MBL, and while it has a happy ending overall, watching it is an emotional rollercoaster for me that I don’t know if I ever want to go on again. I love movies that make me feel things, but I’d kill for a few fun gay action/adventure movies that I could turn off my brain for and just enjoy. If I could just watch a movie where Poe Dameron shoots space nazis and kisses boys, or Billy Kaplan saves the day with his boyfriend, that’d be wonderful.
Eh, I say fuck the not-good reviews for My Beautiful Launderette. I think the movie is, in that ‘80s avant garde cinema type way, fearless and also beautifully cast. I especially remember the scene in the launderette when they are drunk and deliriously happy and begin to make love. I haven’t seen it in a long time either, but you’re not alone in feeling the importance.
Ditto Schindler’s List. Bought the deluxe anniversary DVD and turned it off after thirty minutes. And fuck all the cisgender gay white men who championed the boring ass non-chemistry non-sexual Brokeback Mountain. 1) Harry Hanmil and Michael Ontkean ruined their careers for doing Making Love and deserve all the gay awards for their bravery over dip shits like Meghan McCain and Jay-Z. And damn, the kiss in this film. For straight actors, that shit is still one of the hottest sceens, gay or straight. Not that gay cisgender white American males cared and acted like Bareback Mountain’s cracker fest was actually groundbreaking cinema. Zzzzzzz…
It may have gotten some bad reviews when it first came out, but I think My Beautiful Launderette is now considered a classic British film. It holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Jesus, can you please not do this slideshow format?? Just make thirty ads appear on the side of the screen or something!
Shrinking the width of your browser window forces it to act like a normal page. It’s a pain in the ass, but it beats dealing with the endless clicking bullshit.
Indeed, however, I shouldn’t have to do that…..Still, it is nice to know.
Thanks for the tip, now a whole swath of articles are readable again!
Thanks so much for this tip! Agree we shouldn’t have to do it, but this is a great workaround.
you’re still reading the articles? I just skip to the comments.
I just skip to the comments.The AVClub
Check out these other slideshows!Yeah no
I don’t know if I just never noticed it before, but at least now you can bypass the slideshow and go to the comments. To be clear, AVClub, I hate the slideshows and would like to not have them.
I have to think that was the result of general commenter freakout, especially since some of these are dozens of slides.
My procedure on their listicles now is : *click* “Ah, shit, it’s a slideshow” *doesn’t read article, scrolls down to see who has already complained about the slideshow*
Nice to know I’m not the only one. I guess the only movie I’ll see on the list is Uncut Gems as I do not want to “Start slideshow.”
I don’t know if it’s true for everyone but I can just click “start slideshow” and on the second page there’s a “list slides” button at the top right. It’ll give you a page neatly listing all the entries.
I actually prefer the slideshow format.
History’sGreatestMonster
I’m just going to bet that before we see the end of the godawful slideshow, Big Boy Corpos behind G/O Media will nix comments to eliminate the complaints- then there’s nobody that has a problem with their shite!
try this site on mobile. there is more ad than content. its SHIT. it will often crash your browser.
I almost never want to see any movie again. There’s too many out there to repeat them. I have a few like Snatch and a few others many times. But I generally don’t. Even though I seem to have collected them back in the day. But there are times where if I’m bored and I want to watch something easy I’ll put it on again. The first The Thing I’ve watched many times.
In some ways, rewatching feels like an artifact of the time when finding something new and reasonably good took a bit of a physical, mental, or added financial cost, like driving to a video store or scouring cable listings and waiting. I’m in my 30’s, and I feel like I’m about 1000% less likely to rewatch something now than when I owned a dozen of my favorites on VHS. Because if you have one or more streaming services, there’s always something new worth checking out at the push of a button.
I’d be curious if there are any generational differences in the likelihood and number of repeat viewings of favorite movies.
There’s probably something to this, when I was an 80s kid I would watch a movie over and over just because it was on HBO a lot, or it was one of the few things we had on VHS. Then when we moved to DVDs in the 90s, I owned only 100 movies plus the three art house Netflix discs that I never watched and never sent back. There were always really hard limits on the new movies available to watch at home, and because so many movies are bad, it just naturally led to repeat viewings of the good stuff.My kids like to watch the same few things over and over again even though they have an infinite amount of content available, though, so part of this is just human nature.
That’s like being stuck in a hotel room for three days and enduring the shit cable – watching the same “Game of Thrones” episode three times in one DAY.
I’ve actually started rewatching stuff more and more since I hit my late 20s. (I’m early 30s now.) I’ve realized that there’s a lot of stuff out there that other people like, but just isn’t for me. (I put on John Wick last week and turned it off after 40 minutes. So…the movie is just Keanu Reeves killing bad guys because his wife is dead?) But the really good stuff gets deeper with every viewing. Blade Runner, The Thing, Ugetsu…those are films I can watch over and over and discover new things every time.
I’m 43 and don’t like it often. Though now that I think of it there’s more movies, like Prestige and in fact a lot of Nolan’s films, I have rewatched a few times. I do however try not to go back to far in my childhood to rewatch movies. I find it turns out disappointing because what I once enjoyed I turn on and I’m like, “Why did I like this shit?” The Bill and Ted movies for instance. Though I still want to watch the new one.
Rewatching was definitely an artifact of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when VCRs and cable provided easy access to a narrow selection of films/shows. And theaters were also beneficiaries of that limited access. There were a number of movies I saw repeatedly on the big screen in my teens and 20s simply because they were available – the original Star Wars films most obviously and excessively, but even stuff like Wrath of Khan, or Excalibur.
Today, it’s very rare for me to rewatch something unless I’m specifically introducing it to someone who hasn’t seen it yet. I could count on one hand the number of movies I’ve seen more than twice made since the mid-’90s
Weirdly enough, having so many movies on streaming often means I will scroll through dozens movies and then up just re-watching something I have already seen instead. I have a huge collection of movies and shows on DVD/blu-ray, and used to re-watch lots of stuff because I was showing it to new people. Now I have no new people and barely see any friends or family outside of my wife, but on my own I re-watch stuff that I know I will enjoy instead of committing to something I may or may not enjoy. I’ve re-watched Into the Spider-verse, Mad Max Fury Road, and The Guest like 4 or 5 times each in the last few years, because the chances are very small that anything new I watch is going to provide me with as much entertainment as my 5th re-watch of any of those three movies.
I’m not someone who rewatches things often but I have found recently since hitting my mid-forties that if I rewatch something from 30 years ago, if I only saw it the once I barely have any memory of it unless it was a film I really loved. Even then it’s rare that I revisit something, but it has encouraged me to occasionally give something a second chance.
I guess I should stress that I was a marijuana addict from 20 – 43 though (and am only just over 2 years sober) so that could be why.
Also: Being 46 is fucking weird. I’m not sure I like it at all.
Not sure about generational but I think maybe it has more to do with age. Just generally, you’re more passionate about things when you’re younger as well as still curious. You want rewatch things because you love it and you want to explore everything about that movie. When you’re older, you’re less passionate about the movie but also more aware of how things work and less likely to want to explore.
For me it’s more emotional. I was in a certain emotional space when I experienced some of my favorite stories (Harry Potter, Halt and Catch Fire), and going back to them feels weird and off to me.
Idk. I have probably watched The Prestige a dozen times. I always find something knew. On the negative side, though, if you already know the action’s timeline, a lot of the film’s tension is lost.
I have watched Prestige many, many times. I forgot. Yeah, I just love that because it’s a beautiful movie.
I especially do not like going back and watching older movies because many of them I thought were great suck now. Ha, ha.
The prestige is a rare twist movie that actually gets better for me on rewatches. The shock of it was sadly a one time deal, but the ability to appreciate the subtle movements of the twists make that film hold up very well for me.
To me, great movies are akin to great music: they are not diminished in terms of enjoyment in repeat viewings/listenings.
This is the category I belong to.
I’ve got a collection of about twenty or thirty favorite movies on my computer. I almost never watch them again from start to finish. Every now and then, though, I get the itch, and I go scrolling through the list for the movie that has the scene that I want to see again because that moment in the movie made me feel a particular thing that I’d like to feel again. Never fails.
I look at great paintings a second time, listen to great music far more than once, read great books a second time, and watch great movies a second time, if the mood strikes me. And there’s still enough time available to take in lots of other stuff, as long as you don’t die.
I will watch a movie again if watching it with someone who’s never seen it before–that makes the experience fresh for me. Otherwise i agree. And it’s even more the case for novels for me. I can’t imagine reading a novel twice.
Yes, I will watch a movie again if somebody I’m with hasn’t seen it. That’s a great factor to get me to do it again. And I’m the same with books. No matter how long ago I read it it always seems I’ve just read it. It’s weird because I have a bad memory.
There are enough mediocre movies in the world that sometimes I’d rather watch something I already know is good. There are also a lot of great movies that I haven’t seen, but if I’m being honest the film canon is pretty boring.
All of Jeremy Saulnier’s movies. Since Blue Ruin, I’ve watched each new one eagerly, if anxiously, and each of them riveted me from start to finish, and I never want to see any of them again. But I’ll eagerly watch the next one.Joker was just garbage and a waste of my time.
Green Room I’m pretty sure is the only time I’ve ever thought that all the characters could die in a movie.
I’ve had Hold the Dark in my queue to watch again, but I haven’t been able to do it. I wouldn’t say I liked it the first time, but I think I need to see it again to really know how I felt about it as a film separate from the work it was adapted from. I thought the book was OK but had some shortcomings, and I want to see if the film improves on second viewing. But I just am never in the mood.
Hold the Dark is mysterious and almost mystical-moody enough that I could almost see myself putting it on again … except for that shootout set piece at the midpoint, where the guy in the house is mowing down cops. That really felt like I was witnessing a mass shooting event.
That’s exactly the part that is tripping me up, I think. It’s my own baggage, but it makes it difficult to see myself watching Hold the Dark again. (I used to work as a reporter in conflict zones, and while I am mercifully not affected by PTSD, I do sometimes have not great reactions to prolonged shootout scenes like that. Sometimes the noise is just right to send me back to a couple of close calls that I’d rather not dwell on or the aftermath of some bombings I’d prefer to forget).
I love his movies and I love movies and stories where characters have no plot armor. Closer to real life
Funny, I just put The Irishman on two nights ago, on a whim – “Did I actually like this movie?” – and wound up watching the entire thing, uninterrupted, after thinking “I’ll turn it off and go to bed around the halfway point.” It is, of course, infinitely better on a second viewing, when you can really focus on the moment-to-moment interactions as they happen.Honestly, what I started watching it for was to see if the digital de-aging held up in 4K. And it does! The digital effects work is fairly solid throughout!…but the movement of the actual 70-something actors, trying to carry themselves like they’re three or four decades younger? Not so much. Of course, the whole movie is presented as an old man’s reminiscence; Frank’s imaging everybody in their prime, but more pressing in his memory is when his peers felt their hips go out, and their backs began to ache, and they were lucky to sleep for two hours without having to take a piss. There’s a case to be made that whole dissonance of age thing being a conscious choice on Scorsese’s part. But it could also easily be “I just wanna cast the guys I know how to work with, I don’t wanna find young guys I don’t know to play these guys and deal with makeup and all that.”(But when it comes to young guys that Scorsese didn’t have to worry about aging as the film went on: holy shit, Jack Huston was BORN to play Bobby Kennedy.)
It took me a few sittings to get all the way through it, which was probably a mistake because I found it kind of tedious. Really the whole thing to me was a set up for the last scenes when DeNiro is still refusing to tell the FBI anything, even though every single person involved is dead. Him sitting alone, waiting by himself in a nursing home to die is a brutally downer ending.
I think it’s implying that he got what he deserved though. How he betrayed his friend Jimmy Hoffa was awful and a drawn out slow-motion train wreck of a scene
I’ve watched it 4 times now, and I think it’s amazing.
This slideshow was a handy reminder that the AV Club staff now consists of a bunch of thin-skinned babies.
I’m glad I saw it for the sake of seeing it, but once it was over I knew I’d never watch it again, unlike Goodfellas (for example), which I saw twice in the theater (at least), or much of the rest of his “hits” which I’m happy to watch again and again.
I thought about Bobby Cannavale in a related way. That man, look at him, listen to him! He was born and raised to be in a Scorsese film. I grew up with Scorsese and his films are easy for me to digest, no matter the length. As for my One-And-Done filmmaker, it has to be Charlie Kaufman. I will sit attentive and patient as he drags me through all his little mind twists, plot jumps and jumping through cinematic hoops, but he gets my patronage once per film. Last week with “I’m Thinking Of Ending Things” I was tried and tested once more. Good for me though, it keeps me attentive and open minded.
Oh yeah, there’s that scene where Frank beats the shit out of that one guy and he moves like 79-year-old De Niro.
There’s one reason I *will* go back and watch The Irishman again.All throughout, I was annoyed at the de-aging, but the thing that REALLY kept breaking suspension of disbelief was how Scorsese colored his eyes. That seemed even more unnatural to me than the de-aging and it brought the whole house of cards down more than once.Then, during that amazing scene where Pesci lays out the inevitability of the situation, I notice that DeNiro is talking to the camera and by extension us, with *only his eyes*. It was so subtle that I almost missed how we see the thought process he’s going through just by random glances at the camera. So eventually I’ll get back around to watching it to see if this is the case throughout. That one scene alone is almost as masterful as the nonverbal communication between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance.
The Irishman is a great film. It’s also an indulgent victory lap.
This is definitely one I will not watch again. It was so long and tedious; I appreciated the work that went into it and many of the performances were great, but do not need to see this ever again.
Born on the Fourth of July, 1989. Tom Cruise is genuinely great in that movie. Cannot stand to watch it again. Too stressful.Honey Boy, 2019. Again, terrific performances from Shia LaBoeuf and Noah Jupe, but cannot watch a child get so brutally manipulated more than once.The Florida Project, 2017. Wonderful, moving film but absolutely wrenching to watch.Taxi Driver, 1976. Nope. Not again. Travis Bickle scares me.
Yeah I’ve been wanting to watch Florida Project, but also, kind of not.
To be clear, it is a must see. It was my personal favorite movie of 2017 and, in my mind, top 5 of the 2010s.
Came here to find The Florida Project. Found it. Now we should be friends.Beautiful, beautiful film with beautiful performances from the entire cast. But, much like Moonlight, I’m not sure I can watch it again. I cried (and cried, and cried, and cried) at the end. I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.
I would describe its ending as joyful oblivion. Yes their life afterwards will probably be shit, but they experienced one moment of pure rapture. Was it worth it?
I re-watched Taxi Driver back when the first Joker trailer came out because it seemed so obvious to me that it was a re-telling of the same story. I used to love Taxi Driver but *man* it does not age well. Or, rather, our society has degraded to the point that Travis Bickle no longer seems like a far fetched fantasy.
Speaking of that, I thought this thread revisiting it was interesting:
Huh, I found The Florida Project a relatively easy watch even if there’s some harshness around. Usually the kids are barely aware of how bad things are.
Happiness springs to mind. It was great, but fuck, I’ll never watch it again.
I’m glad every time I see Dylan Baker in something, because he was amazing in that, but it is amazing he still has a career after fully inhabiting one of the most horrific monsters I have ever seen on screen.
Had a friend who in college who mentioned she watched that movie just about daily. The mind boggles.
That’s the reddest flag of all.
I want this woman’s take on “Storytelling”.
The theater where I saw Happiness put a sign at the door: “No Refunds After 15 Minutes.”
Reminds me of the signs put up in theaters when Dancer in the Dark came out warning that the film led to people becoming nauseous and even throwing up. Sure enough, took a big group and two felt I’ll sigh one yacking.
Dancer In The Dark is the correct answer to this article. It’s good. And it rips your fucking heart out. No drug use plot needed.
I was going to say that about Von Trier in general, but I always end up rewatching his stuff….except Dogville. And Nymphomaniac…and I refuse to even watch Antichrist.
I guess I’m surprised that they apparently offered refunds before 15 minutes. For any movie. The only time I’ve ever heard about refunds was when I was watching one of the Mission Impossible movies and about three-fourths of the way through the fire alarm sounded and the theater had to be evacuated.
I don’t think they normally gave refunds; I think the manager wanted to forestall any angry demands.
Happiness was so darkly funny, but good lord, the sheer level of bleak darkness in that film is overpowering. Even finishing it once was so hard. I laughed at a lot of it, but maybe that was just to stave off the horror of it.
I’d say Happiness too, as it extremely quotable but not really worth rewatching.
Never saw an encore minute of it, but Happiness was one of those weird theater experiences where I was often the only one laughing at certain parts. It just has that dark humor that hits people in different ways.
That movie was recommended to me and I can check it off my list, but it was extremely hard to watch as the father of two young boys at the time.
I had to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? over the course of two days as it was. Watching Liz Taylor and Richard Burton brutally tearing strips off each other for a couple hours is absolutely exhausting. Great film tho.
Yeah, A Woman Under the Influence for the same general principle. Just too emotionally draining.
I don’t know if I could ever make it through Hereditary again. It was just so traumatic, like a lot of it is just a mortifying drama instead of a horror movie. I think Midsommar is the worse movie but also, a bit more fun?
Schindler’s List. I saw it in the theater with my best friend and her parents when it came out. I was 13. It absolutely wrecked me. I had never cried so much at a movie in my life. To this day, 27 years later, having never seen it again, I can clearly picture scenes from it. I tried to watch it with my Husband years later and I just couldn’t do it. It was just too overwhelming.
For me it’s Grave of the Fireflies. One of the best films I’ve ever seen but it caused me to enter into a clinical depression for about a month after I watched it (and I know that sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. I walked around for about a month afterwards unable to feel pleasure from anything).
Too many. It’s kinda hard to find the right time to sit at home and think “you know what, let’s put that real downer on the TV for a couple of hours”.
“The China Syndrome”I can’t even explain why beyond that the film was enjoyable and I very much appreciated what it was saying, but once was enough.
Literally gave me nightmares….
Oh for God’s sake. Do you know how much time I’ve spent trying to forget this film ever existed? The ending annoyed me greatly!
I had forgotten about this one, and had been meaning to watch it.
It’s… not an easy watch, but very well made.
“Marriage Story.”
Oh yeah fuck that. Never again. Having sat through my parents divorcing, this one hit way too fucking hard.
Grave of the Fireflies has been mentioned, so I’ll say Leaving Las Vegas. Great movie but my god…
Oh for sure. Two hours or watching a man commit slow-motion suicide is a trial, no matter how fabulous the performances.
I’m surprised Gasper Noe’s Irreversible wasn’t on the list, the ending is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in cinema, but the first half is so painfully horrible that I’ll never watch it again.
I’m not surprised to see Gasper Noe’s Climax on the list though, as that’s a hateful, nihilistic piece of shit that has nothing of value to say in the slightest.
apparently a blu-ray of Irreversible is coming out with a chronological cut added in as a bonus featureso instead of something beautiful to take you out and leave you with an iota of pleasantness at the end, you get the nice stuff at the beginning and get to stew in the fucked up part with no palette cleanser when it’s over. sounds like fun
Yeesh, that sounds horrific, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the film’s overall message. I see Noe’s responsible for it too, which is bleak, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been giving him way too much credit over the years when it comes to the film.
yeah, it’s a weird thing to do. i mean, Memento came with a chronological cut on one of the DVDs and it was fun to watch once, strictly as a curiosity, because it completely fucks up the entire narrative thrust and turns it into a totally run-of-the-mill movie with no real hookbut you’ve got Noe out there himself, hyping up this Irreversible chronological cut like it’s something great and special when it’s basically just gonna make it into a standard revenge movie
Exactly, and it’s not as if there aren’t a depressing amount of those already. Either way I think I’m done with Noe now, I hated Climax so much that reviews of a new movie from him would have to be astoundingly positive for me to give it a shot.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ with Bjork from 2000. I was emotionally destroyed for 24 hours after watching it in the theater in NYC during CMJ fest. Can’t even listen to the soundtrack. But it was the best movie I’ve ever seen.
A Serbian Film.Unlike many others I did not find the gore in the movie, nor the infamous scene, particularly shocking. It’s just that the emotional beats in the movie, for example the conversations between Miloš and his son, were so perfect the first time around and work best when you don’t know in advance what will happen to the characters. The entire movie is etched into my mind, from start to finish, anyway, since just about every scene, even the non-violent ones, is rather unique and recognisable.
That’s one that not only would I not expect to want to watch again, but after reading the description (and against my better judgement watching the ending online) I have exactly zero intention of ever viewing. It sounds like someone won a contest for most miserable screenplay and the prize was having it filmed.
And it’s shit. Definitely the worst film for pervert poseurs to jerk off over.
Pretty much my thoughts about it as well. Who can be the biggest gross asshole for no reason should not be a filmmaking/screenwriting achievement people should strive for.
I was curious if someone would bring up Serbian Film. Ya…the film is quite good despite its grim and upsetting nature but like my roomie said (he kinda “forced” me to watch it about 10 years ago) while it may be a well made film I would recommend it to no one. Its rough man.
Citizen Kane is one I appreciate watching but have no desire to watch again. For me, it was like a classic novel you only read once.
Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade…mmmm hmmmm.
Good call. I’ve had a digital copy in my possession for ten years. Could never bring myself to see it again. Deleted it a few days ago.
French fried taters, mmm hmm.
I can definitely understand it with Uncut Gems (so tense) and Sorry to Bother You (so weird… albeit, a weirdness I do enjoy going back to myself).For me I think it’s a tie between The Road (though I did pick up a copy of that to watch again recently… I just haven’t managed it) or Bone Tomahawk.Both great… just hard to find the right time/mood to want to watch either!
Uncut Gems is the only movie I can recall where I felt a palpable sense of relief at the end of the film. I think I actually said, “Thank God,” out loud in the theater. I just needed him to stop. Stop talking, stop ruining his life for no reason, just stop. I related very much to the goons in that moment.
I’m never sure how to react when I hear people say that they really wanted Howard to win and that makes the ending more difficult for them (I know that isn’t what you’re saying). I do find the ending difficult, but that’s more because the whole movie has set up for viewers, at times in anguished detail, that Howard can never succeed because he always has to go higher, take another risk, never stop, and also because the Safdie brothers and Eric Bogosian manage to slowly make you care about Howard’s father-in-law and see him not as just another thug shaking Howard down for money but as someone who does want to help but is trapped in the same life and also unable to stop Howard from hurting himself and those around him. I sometimes wonder if part of the reason Julia is built up more in her own right in the last third of the movie is to make the ending not quite as bleak – she’s going to have a chance, even if Howard isn’t.
I found Uncut Gems an interesting watch, but beyond the actual sound design and editing it was never really “tense” for me. There was nothing that made me care about Sandler’s character, and it was obvious from early on that he was just going to keep making bigger and crazier bets and deals until it caught up with him. I felt bad for some of the other characters roped into his nonsense, but that was the extent of my emotional connection to the movie.
I agree the sound and editing helped quite a bit. I thought Sandler gave a great performance but other than the scene where he broke down talking about what a fuckup he is (which he quickly forgot, as many adrenaline junkies tend to do), I didn’t really sympathize with him. I’m not sure we were meant to, but either way the real stories in the film for me were those around him and how they had to cope with him. There was one other scene where I felt for him – when he was trying to talk to his daughter after he embarrassed her at the play, and she was just tuning him out the way a teenager often does with their parents, not realizing that her father was so messed up and was barely making it through each day alive. It had a lot of layers, and they didn’t overegg the pudding by trying to make us feel one way or another for father or daughter, instead just letting the scene play out naturally.
I wanted Howard to win, but partly because I was so impressed with the callback to the broken buzz-lock door at his jewelry store after such a frenetic pace of horrifying decisions. The dumb, crazy luck of this guy. Why not keep it going?
Also, the suspense must be at least somewhat better-suited to people like me who know enough about basketball to enjoy the novelty of Kevin Garnett in a gritty movie with Adam Sandler, but not enough to know the results of the real Celtics playoff game being gambled on at the end.
I started watching Uncut Gems at home with my mom, using a friend’s screener DVD (the perks of being friends with an awards show voter). It was so singularly unpleasant that after 20 minutes we had to turn it off. I finished it later that night when my mom had gone to bed, but damn was every single minute of it suffering. Someone in another comment above mentioned Ebert saying no good movie was depressing. This is why Uncut Gems doesn’t fall into the category of a movie I “enjoyed.” I’ll never watch it again because the first time was so unpleasant, I never want to experience that again. To this day, I cannot say whether it was a good film or not because it was so assaultive to the viewer that I found it impossible to focus. That, to me, isn’t what narrative filmmaking should ascribe to be, but I suppose reasonable people can disagree on this. I can’t say whether Sandler deserved more nominations, because the performance was all noise to me. So I for one will never watch it again. I barely made it through the first time, and I love challenging/non-traditional films. Heck, I loved the suffer-fest Ida. But Uncut Gems was a bridge too far.
I think it did a remarkable job at capturing a certain kind of person. The one that lives for drama. The one that, try as hard as they might, can’t simply just *be.*
The only film I stopped. I watched enough Wile E. Coyote cartoons as a kid that I just can’t anymore.
YES, Uncut Gems stressed me out from the very beginning to the end. I just wanted it to be over. Too much yelling, too many people, just too much, even though it was well acted, it just needed to stop.
I stopped Uncut Gems about 2/3 through because something came up, not because I wanted to stop watching. I was enjoying it, but I have no interest in going back to finish it.
I read The Road and that was enough for me. Love me some Viggo, but no thanks.
The Road. Great movie great performances. Will cause depression.
Never seen the movie; reading the book once was enough. It’s the rare story where you’re looking for how the author is going to work out a happy ending, but realizing early on that the entire situation is completely beyond hope. The fact that you actually feel you’ve gotten a happy ending with the way things work out is testament to how bleak the rest of the story is. McCarthy is my favorite author, and he says more about humanity with fewer words than any other work I have encountered.
I don’t know what you’re talking about with the book. They got to the bunker which was full of food and all their needs were looked after and the didn’t have to scavenge anymore.Great uplifting ending. I did notice there were more pages past that point but I’m not big on reading appendices attached to the main story. If it’s important enough to the plot, it’d be in the main narrative itself, wouldn’t it?
Once were warriors
The Green Mile.
The movie Us. I’m not much of a horror fan, so there’s that. When the horror comes with a great heaping side of social commentary the way Us did, I may have to watch it again in the same night just to make sure I got it and then I’m done.
The English Patient, because I saw it and loved it and don’t want to see any flaws in a subsequent viewing.Audition, because I saw it and was terrified and don’t want to be terrified to that level ever again.
I think Seinfeld’s treatment of The English Patient pretty much nails it.“Just die already. DIE.”
Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.
There are quite a few, since I rarely revisit comedies, or movies which revolve around a major plot twist, simply because of the supposed surprise, although there are exceptions simply through the performances or the cleverness of the construction such as Psycho and a number of others up to something like Knives Out, and giallos are a delicious pleasure. On the other end of the scale I won’t be rewatching much of Tartovsky, Fassbinder or Eisenstein, the heavier end of the serious market, although I’ve seen and mostly enjoyed them, and I’m also someone who will never watch Salo again, or Elem Klimov’s utterly crushing Come And See, or Vaclav Harmoul’s The Painted Bird, which I caught at last year’s LFF. Incredibly powerful but I’m one and done with those, thanks.
This is one of my favourite scenes from any movie but I can’t watch the whole movie again. The ending is so viciously drenched in bile than I just feel too uncomfortable even thinking about it. I much prefer the one from the book in that it shows all parties concerned have learned something from the experience, especially the adults who should have known better and especially with hindsight can realise their perspective better (it was just a student election, not a big thing in the grand scheme of things at all, really as opposed to the movie where no-one seemed to have learned anything).I later learned they did film something closer to the end of the book courtesy of a copy of at least part of it found on a VHS at a flea market or something but it wasn’t executed that fantastically so I can understand why they reshot it due to it being a bit of a wet squib in ending the movie.Some scenes were done better than the book (like Tammy’s election speech above) but others like the ending originally made that was more similar to the book were not.
Election was the first movie I thought of when I saw this title, and almost wrote a post about it.
I feel that way about a lot of Alexander Payne’s films. There’s a nastiness to him that kind of rubs me the wrong way (even though I have watched Sideways multiple times). I never could figure out what the point of that one scene in About Schmidt where Nicholson meets the younger couple and tries to make out with the wife was. Election is a funny film, but it bugs me that Matthew Broderick ends up in such a shitty place. He made a few bad decisions and it ruined his life. I don’t think he deserves everything that happens to him.
Cheating on his wife and sanctimoniously trying to screw over a bunch of high school kids by deliberately altering the outcome of a student election for no good reason other than he doesn’t like one of the candidates – who is, to be fair, unlikable – is ‘a few bad decisions’?
I don’t remember a whole lot from the movie (I liked it a lot but it’s been years and years since I saw it) but I have a vivid memory of about three seconds of it— a shot from inside a moving car, out the back, and a thrown (by Broderick) milkshake splatting into the back window. Is that from the ending? Or near it?
That is the ending.
No shot from inside the car, but otherwise, that’s what happened.
I think it was a giant cup of Pepsi, not a milkshake. As a callback to when he and Tracey Flick argued about Coke vs. Pepsi and how Pepsi was inferior. He was still drinking the inferior stuff all the way to the end!
Man, I wish Jessica Campbell (Tammy) had been in more stuff. I had a big (age-appropriate, I was 14) crush on her after Election, and other than a memorable guest role on Freaks and Geeks it seems she only did like 3 other movies and then quit acting.
I recently watched F&G for the first time and was pleasantly surprised that Jessica was in it, as like you I had a massive crush on her when I first saw her in Election. I always wonder what she’s up to these days as she seems to have disappeared.
I love this movie (and Matthew Broderick is one of my favorite actors) but it is such a hard watch for me that if I see it on tv, I watch for a minute and get out before I’m too affected.
Sophie’s Choice, holy fuck..
The Shape of Things — Neil LaBute was just so cruel to poor Paul Rudd! I instantly knew I could never watch it again, but I thought it was a great film. In retrospect I wonder if it holds up, so it might be best not to revisit anyway.
Casting Paul Rudd was a particularly brilliant cruelty. Fucking LaBute, man. I love his work, but it also makes me think there’s no way he’s not an asshole.
Pan’s Labyrinth, which was beautiful and horrific and once was quite enough.
There are a lot of movies I like but I’m not seeking them out, and no one channel-surfs anymore, so I’m not going to stumble across them and say to myself, “ooh, I’ll keep it here for a while.” I suppose the question is about good movies but also have some element to them that make the viewer say “Oh my God, that’s horrible!” But all the movies I can think of that are like that are straight-up motherfucking classics I’ll happily watch a bunch, like Robocop (of course Murphy’s brutalization is just ick) or Braveheart (multiple de-limbings in battle scenes, ends with torture).I can’t think of anything I’ve seen that’s just emotionally draining to watch. And I typically don’t care for movies that set out to get that reaction, anyway.
There Will Be Blood. (Saw it opening weekend in theaters, absolutely loved it, don’t need to see it again and have never been tempted.)
I literally said as we were leaving the theater, “I’m glad I saw that, but I have no desire to see it ever again.” It belongs to a whole category of movies for me that I describe as “I like it, but I’m not going to put it on in the background while I clean the house.”
It took me a good ten years before I could re-watch There Will be Blood, and I only really returned to it because I was assigning it my class. I liked it again on second viewing, but I don’t assign it every time I teach that class. It sort of takes it out of me. Conversely, a similarly difficult film like No Country for Old Men, I find eminently re-watchable. It makes the cut every year.
I always associate those two films with each other, to the point where it consistently takes me a few seconds to remember which is which whenever one or the other comes up. I don’t know why (maybe because of the long-ish names and/or both being released the the same year). But yeah, now that you mention it, I share the same feelings as you do in regard to re-watching.
The names and the proximity of their releases to each other lends itself to that impression, definitely. I think they’re both thematically similar as well. They grapple with ideas about what America is/can/should be, with the onrushing future vs the America of the past vs. the myth of America, the corruption of men, and the ways we exploit each other. Both films seem to share a tone and a weariness if not a time period or cinematic style. They’re actually pretty good companion pieces, and the years when I teach both films, the students often have great discussions about what these films say about America. I’ve also recently done Hell or High Water alongside There will be Blood, and it went well, too. Lots of great discussions about capitalism and the world it creates.
I’m late to the game, I know, but I had to let you know how much I appreciate your comment. Thank you.
It’s gorgeous. Worth re-watching for the composition and cinematography alone. Of course, I am a huge Kubrick fan and this film seems to draw from him quite a bit.
Probably Looper? I’m not sure if I actually liked it. I *feel* as if I did, I saw it in theaters and bought it when it came out, but I’ve never ever felt the desire to rewatch it.
Nights of Cabiria. Because she reminds me of someone.
God I love that movie. Saw it for the first time last year, and I’ve watched it four times since. Giulietta Masina is such a pure beautiful spirit. The hypnosis scene wrecks me — such a perfect marriage (literally) of formal brilliance and a brilliant performance.
There’s libraries full of movies that fit into this category for me; there’s so many movies that I loved but – for whatever reason – have no desire to watch again. Here’s a list that comes to mind most immediately, in no particular order other than when they came to me:Roma
Road to Perdition
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Sweet Movie
The Beast (le Bete, 1975)
Any movie by Gaspar Noe (i.e. Irreversible)
Any movie by Lars von Trier (i.e. Antichrist, Meloncholia, Nymphomaniac, etc.)
Any movie by Harmony Korine (i.e. Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, etc.)
Any movie by Larry Clark (except for Kids)
A Serbian Film
Too many others to list
I’m someone that usually doesn’t rewatch movies, although in most cases it’s more a ‘don’t want to’ than ‘actively won’t’. I’ll watch most movies if they’re on and I don’t have something else to do.The one exception may be Idiocracy. I used to love it, it’s the kind of movie that gets by on the sheer density of jokes (see also Airplane, my absolute favorite). But as I started to realize the actual politics of the movie—and crucially that I disagreed hard with them—I turned pretty hard against it, and I don’t think I could stomach watching it again, seeing that worldview.
I tried to rewatch it once, but lost interest once the scientist stopped talking about Upgrayedd.
Just out of curiosity, what about it’s politics that turned you off? Some people think the movie is pretty prophetic
Those people, actually.It’s largely ruined by that opening montage of the two families, nailing in the stance of ‘society turns to crap because (poor) stupid people are breeding while (rich) smart people aren’t’. Which is, you know, classist at best and painfully eugenics-ey at worst. And Mike Judge has generally put down that that’s the ‘correct’ reading.Which is a shame, because without that opener it becomes a whole lot better, with the time-jump montage essentially pinning the blame on capitalism driving intellectuals away from improving the world in favor of profits. Brawndo didn’t get used to water crops because people genuinely thought it was a good idea, but because Brawndo decided to market it like it was.
That’s one of my favorite bits :(No, you’re sort of right in that assessment although he’s also making of fun of the white collar Yuppie types for being smug and so self-centered that they think having a kid gets in the way of their personal needs and fulfillment. It’s not like they’re too busy trying to save the world or something, they’re basically just wanting to be rich and successful. Demographically, there’s some truth behind it. But you’re right, it is a bit problematic.
Atonement. If you haven’t read the book and don’t know what’s coming, it can wreck you. I had to watch pride and prejudice twice afterwards to get rid of that awful feeling.
I definitely got blindsided by the ending.
Never seen the movie, but the book does as good a job at pulling the rug as anything I’ve ever read. I had to read that passage twice.
It’s stunning to look at. Keira’s green dress earns it’s attention. I’ve always wondered how people who read the book first felt about it, if it had the same emotional devastation. ***SPOILERS***I knew something wasn’t right from his story. You don’t survive a wound like he had. But when the twist came, I was still blind-sided. I have never been so wrong about the reliability of a narrator before.
God, that movie is stunning. I guess I’ve avoided rewatching it inadvertently because my mind was just so blown by it the first time, it’s basically impossible to recapture that feeling again on a rewatch. (I found it to be the good kind of wrecking though, at least for me, not the hurty feel bad kind.)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Great movie, saw it in the theater (when I was barely 17!) and I have no need to ever see it again. I still remember all of it, so much so that when Michael Nyman’s score showed up in that Mister Rogers trailer I instantly started crying.More recently it’d be Where the Wild Things Are. Someone gave me the Blu-Ray as a present and it’s just been collecting dust. I loved it, but.
I saw “TCTTHW&HL” when I was 19, and almost walked out of the theater, about half way through. But I toughed it out and stayed for the whole movie. I did, however, cry hysterically the whole walk home. Every time I think I should give it a rewatch I just can’t bring myself to do it.
“Dead Ringers” is another one that left me totally freaked out by the end of it. That is another one I will never watch again.
Mentioned it in a thread the other day. Enjoyed Terminator Salvation in the theater and even bought the blu ray. Haven’t watched it in years because I don’t want to ruin that joy in retrospect.
There was a sequel to Terminator Salvation which was exception but that’s to be expected when J, Michael Straczynski writes it.You can read the first two parts here legally for free but I’d recommend trying to find the whole thing.https://io9.gizmodo.com/a-terminator-the-last-battle-bombshell-plus-read-two-1636523202
I have a soft spot for all the post T2 Terminator sequels. They are all just big dumb fun spectacles.
Paul Verhovens Elle
Children of Men. Fantastic movie but I was so tense and anxious through the whole thing, and then it left me with such an unsettled, anxious feeling for hours afterward.
That movie felt like I was watching somebody else play a video game.
A lot have been listed already, so I’ll just add Children of Men. So, so good; wrecked me and I’m too scared to watch again.
You know, I love “What Dream May Come”, but following the suicide of Robin Williams, it has become unwatchably sad.
I felt similarly with Synecdoche NY after Philip Seymour Hoffman died— I’d been planning to rewatch it, then he passed, and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it again yet. I know it’s been 4 or 5 years already, but still. (Though I have seen other movies with him in it since.)
A friend of mine was binging his films shortly after his death. I tried to warn him that this one and The Fisher King would be too painful to watch so soon. He did not listen.
I still have a hard time watching Good Will Hunting as well
I can always watch The Fisher King. With What Dreams May Come, it’s mainly that half the movie is spent explaining and/or visually depicting the idea that suicide irrevocably dooms your soul to an eternity of mournful confusion and desperate madness (unless you happen to be one half of an impossibly rare star-crossed soul mate combo). It was a bummer in the first place. Now, it’s like, ooph.
Instead you could watch World’s Greatest Dad, about Williams’ character’s son accidentally killing himself. Its a comedy!
Mystic RiverGood fucking gawd, I never want to see that again. Such an amazingly acted film with very depressing subject matters.
I’m generally not a fan of rewatching movies in general, especially when it comes to longer movies. So a lot of people I know see it as insane that I’ve only seen Avengers Endgame once.
I’ve only seen it once and even that was one time too many. I was not impressed.
Imho, There’s not much point to re-watching a movie when 80-90% of the point of the movie is plot.
Yesss thank you! To me plot is pointless; it’s a made-up story. Characters are much more interesting to me. I’ll take a movie with a dumb plot but fun well-developed characters anyday
I’ve seen Infinity War several times but Endgame only once. Infinity War works much better as a film than Endgame which is a glorified tribute to the MCU
I don’t know if it was said in the verdammt, thrice cursed, irritating slideshow…..But Magnolia was a movie that I thought was great when I watched it. Bought the DVD, and then couldn’t bring myself to watch it again. I feel like 3 Billboards is gonna be the same.
Seven. Just too grim. Same with all of the Day After films, some of which are very good films. I’m trying to curb my habit of rewatching films generally because there’s so much I still need to see.
Grave of the Fireflies is a stunning, beautiful, amazing lovely film that everyone should watch. I will never watch Grave of the Fireflies ever again.
Ya thats a hard agree from me on all counts. That movie wrecked me.
This has come up a few times as well, and I was thinking I might actually rewatch it, until I saw the trailer again. Not doing that again.
I’m going to have to continue to exist never having watched Salo once and satisfy myself with the intellectual point of it all—but I wanted to mention that I was in a small youtube hole of watching people pick movies from the Criterion closet and the still that previews Gaspar Noe’s visit is him holding up a copy of Salo which of course.
For me, it’s THE HORSEMAN, about a grieving dad who exacts terrible revenge upon the men involved in his daughter’s death. I found it an emotionally powerful movie, especially revelations later on, but good grief if it isn’t also draining.
Grave of the Fireflies, enough said
Probably Green Room. I might be ready to revisit that one day, but not any day soon.
Reservoir Dogs. The torture of Tim Roth’s character was so gruesome, especially when they cut-off his ear. It’s completely different from watching the cartoon violence of a superhero movie. GREAT movie, but I won’t watch it again.
I’m gonna go with Hereditary, although I’m actually not entirely sure I’m glad I saw it the first time. I’ll never, ever get THAT cut scene image out of my head.
I was somewhat disappointed in it the first go-round, largely because I saw it in a theater full of people, some of whom were laughing at the end. So I watched it again about a year ago in the privacy of my own home and was sufficiently blown away. It’s incredible. And, I would suggest, it gets better with each viewing.
I also saw it in the theater and the group I was with (the random people there) ALSO laughed basically the entire way through. (Welllllll, maybe not during a couple specific scenes. Ahem.) It was kind of a nervous laughter mostly but it fuckin’ sucked regardless.Maybe I should try a rewatch as well. I found it pretty upsetting the first time though, despite the jackassery.
I’m conflicted with that movie. It was the first movie I genuinely felt sick during and wanted to leave, because of not only the grotesque violence but the emotional terrorism throughout. (I closed my eyes for most of the ending which made things easier). But I also don’t want to watch it again because I thought it was a much smarter movie than it actually was. I enjoyed the psychological aspects of it, wondering if the characters were dealing with mental illness made worse by grief. Then I find out it’s some bizarre cult responsible for the whole thing? Nahhh I’m good, I liked it better when it was ambiguous. For instance the naked people I thought were the spirits of the family bloodline that had been tainted by this illness for generations. But nope! Random cult. For being called Hereditary it was actually not about heredity at all. It was far too literal for me to truly enjoy.
Ari Aster makes some great but difficult movies. I recall he mentioned in an interview that making Hereditary was therapeutic. You can tell he’s been through some shit because he’s so good at depicting trauma.Midsommar had a well-observed depiction of PTSD that triggered flashbacks for me. Really well done, but it’d be tough to watch that again.
Mysterious skin is the movie that comes to mind for me. I saw it many many years ago, and it utterly captivated me. It was absolutely beautiful on nearly every level, but the film was so bleak and so utterly brutal with it’s themes that it broke me to the point I will never bring myself to watch it again, but I remember the qualities so vividly.
Filmed in my hometown! My (future) wife got a picture with JGL at the mall while they were shooting it!
The Dark Knight. Either I’m in a good mood and don’t want to watch something depressing or I’m not and want to watch something that makes me feel better
“Enjoy” is maybe not the right word, but American History X was amazing, but I can’t watch it again.
Little Children with Kate Winslet. Saw it a few months ago during lockdown, was a very good film, deserved all the accolades it got (especially the guy playing the child molester, who got an Oscar nom). But, really, I have no desire whatsoever to ever sit through it again.
Night and Fog.Obviously, “enjoy” is nuanced given what this film is. It’s amazing, breathtaking, and incredibly important, and I am really glad I saw it, but I could never bring myself to watch it again. I saw it when I was an undergrad, probably in 1993, as part of a “World at War” class. It was once a week, which meant it was a 3-hour class. The professor would lecture for the first part and show a film of some sort in the second part, usually a documentary.He warned us about this one, and gave people the option to nope out. But nothing he said could have prepared us for it. It’s been nearly three decades and I still can’t get it out of my head entirely.
“Eraserhead.” It really opened my eyes to the aesthetic potential of films, especially micro-budgeted ones, as well as being one of the few truly nightmarish pieces of art/entertainment I’ve ever seen. I also saw it opening night in the Detroit era and about 80% of the severely rattled audience walked out by the end. That sight alone was priceless and I smile just thinking about it. I’ve tried watching it since and it’s just not the same and that’s less a reflection on the film than on how much I’ve changed since. The visceral experience wasn’t remotely the same. I actually love watching most movies the second time more than the first. I’m more attuned to them and appreciate them so much more, they just open up for me.
I watched that with headphones on in the dark. Baddd idea. Also I can’t imagine watching that in a city or industrial area. Lynch was supposedly inspired by his stay in the industrial urban wasteland of Philadelphia in the ‘70s.
Come and see. It’s on The Criterion Channel; after having read about it and seeing the trailer I really wanted to see it, with only a vague idea of what it was about.After it was done, I had to turn off all the lights and just process what the hell I just experienced.
All of them. Who needs to see anything twice? I’ve seen it!
For me, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth, I even bought the DVD, thinking to take another go at it, but have never watched it. The combination of horror and heartbreak is just too much for me.
Right?!?!My daughter is 10 and is developing a really interesting and rather dark taste in stories and film. I showed her the (American) Pans Labyrinth trailer and she thought it was some kind of live action remake of the Bowie ‘Labyrinth’ – I have convinced her to give it a shot though.She will appreciate the stepfathers fate.
ET. I saw it in the theater when it came out. I liked it. I’ve had no desire to see it since.
I said in high school that I’d never watch “Eraserhead” again, but that was a long, long time ago and I’ve watched it since then. It’s nowhere near as revolting once you know what you’re getting into. It’s really just well-made and sort of stupid, actually.
Moonlight is in an interesting choice, because as tough as it is, it’s quite rewatchable to me. Anyway, my favorite movie of last year is The Nightingale. I have toyed with the idea of treading the waters of torture and misanthropy and nihilism of Jennifer Kent’s revenge story, but seeing it in theaters, right up close, that film’s lodged in my brain and not going anywhere.
Sin Nombre is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s first movie, and it’s a beautifully shot, horrifying story about a Honduran girl trying to reach the U.S. and a Mexican gang member with doubts about his allegiances. I watched it with my roommates in college and we all agreed that it was really good and maybe the saddest thing we’d ever seen.
I don’t think enjoy is the correct word. The Road was a very good movie for what it was, but I never ever want to see that shit again.
Funny Games. I only saw the remake, and it was good and well done, but no desire to see it again.
Ya that was a very good movie. I don’t wanna watch it again either now that I think about it lol.
oh my god, how could anyone ENJOY “Salo”? Yes i know its a big ww2 metaphor, bla, etc. But its STILL just a bunch of children being raped and tortured on screen. I dont see how anyone could actually call it an enjoyable experience.
I’m with John Waters, in that it’s a either a beautiful art house film masquerading as Exploitation or vice versa, but either way it’s definitely it’s own thing. It’s not your typical art film, that’s for sure: but it’s so clearly better made than an exploitation film of that era. And like a lot of art films, it’s dull in parts. That end with the soldiers dancing is incredible, considering what came before.
I would say Dancer in the Dark or Breaking the Waves, but I can definitely rewatch those now that I think about it, LvT’s hijinks aside. Really, any P.T. Anderson movie: Magnolia was certainly entertaining the first time (22 year old me) but, unbearable the second go round (42 year old me). The characters all seemed to enjoy the smell of their own farts way too much, except Robards, of course.
There are many films, but I’ll just list two for positive and traumatic experience. Positive: Wild Boys of the Road. It’s a wrenching film but also has a great deal of heart and warmth, made even better by being unencumbered by many of the tropes of the “youth movie” genre (no love triangles, no romantic angst). It’s also one of the times that I would say a studio-mandated happy ending is a good idea (and Wellman doesn’t let it be too absurdly happy anyway – the final moment reminds us that amid the friendship and chance for a fresh start, some pains are permanent). Traumatic: Threads. Yes, the attack scene and aftermath is horrific, but it’s the buildup in the first hour that really stays with me – the near-constant sound of jets flying overhead, the characters struggling to hide their unease at what they fear is coming, and most of all, the anti-nuke rally that is ruined by factionalism and crushed by outside forces. That in particular was extremely hard for me watch. The numbness and helplessness of that whole first half connects way too much to where we are now and was very difficult for me to shake.
The movie “Threads”. I don’t think I’ve watched a more unnerving and terrifying film before. For a TV Film from the 80s, it did it’s job really well, in that it made me terrified as hell about possible Nuclear War, but it was so bleak. A good watch that I’ll never see it again.
The US version was “The Day After” which we were encouraged to see the night it aired by out teachers. On the plus side I remember my Father saying that we lived close enough to NYC that more than likely we’d just be obliterated in the first wave as opposed to dying of radiation.Good times.
Grave of the FirefliesJesus that movie.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a movie I believe I first saw on home media when I was about 10. Nearly 30 years later I still watch it a few times a year — and I’m still finding new things to be awed and intrigued by. The visuals alone are enough for me to want to watch it over and over again though.
I went from finding 2001 a pretentious bore with great visual effects on my first viewing as a teenager to finding it an absolutely stunning work of art that I can’t get enough of as a 42 year old. I purchased the 4k blu ray a couple years ago before I even owned a 4k television. I love it.Cinema Tyler put out a wonderful multi-part analysis/making of documentary series on Youtube about 2001 if your into behind the scenes stuff.
SE7ENNope. Nope….and Nope.
Dancer in the Dark and Requiem for a Dream
surprised it took this long for Dancer to be mentioned. Holy Fuck did that one stay with me for awhile.Also…”I Melt With You” .. saw it once, dont need to relive that one again.
One of the most powerful theater experiences. I will never forgot the sight of the huge and beautiful Samoan behind me. I turned to see if the audience was as devastated as I was to see this man, owning his emotions and allowing a sea of tears that illuminated him. It took the audience about five minutes to get up and leave the theater. Yet, I can watch it, and still allow myself to be immersed in the story at least once a year. The only other film that takes me away emotionally like this is West Side Story. The Anita rape scene and the Maria ending floor me everyone. Fuck those who say Natalie Wood, the brown face, or the jazz fights gender the movie. Fuck, Singing in the Rain has an Inception dance scene and nobody says that takes away from that films beauty. It’s Natalia Woods and more importantly Rita Moreno’s raw and honest performance, like Bjork’s, that turn me into an emotional messy. And for me, that’s Hollywood, baby!
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Brilliant film. Never want to go through that again.
The Shining.It’s fantastic. I love it. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. I even often find myself talking about it with other movie loving friends and wanting to watch it.But then I remember the old lady in the bathtub, one of the few movie moments still capable of giving me honest-to-goodness nightmares, and it’s an instant nope.
Whenever I come across The Shining during my channel surfing, I have to stop whatever I’m doing and finish it.
Any movie with torture porn really. Of course one that has an engaging plot as well.The remake of The Last House On The Left for example. I really enjoyed it first viewing, but don’t really care to watch it again.Now that I think about it, I feel that way about a lot of the horror remakes they’ve had. Not to say they had good plots or anything.
Slideshows break comments. I’m here for the comments. Or rather, I’m not here, because comments are broken.
My friend Michelle would say Meet The Feebles. To which I say, “Screw you, Michelle.” Meet The Feebles is very rewatchable.
Meet the Feebles would be one of my answers. I bought the DVD based on its reputation and Jackson, because at the time that was the only way I had any chance of seeing it (and its frankly amazing that there was even a copy in my mall’s Camelot or whatever it was back then). I watched it with some friends, and put it back in the DVD case knowing I would never open it again. It definitely had its share of laughs and demented genius, but the whole thing is so grimy and there are so many unpleasant characters/scenes that I just don’t want to do it again. Made me feel like I needed a shower. It looks and feels like someone shooting a snuff film with puppets they found in the garbage.
Oh, I agree with you on all fronts. Especially needing to take a shower after watching it. I was an early supporter of Jackson’s films (pre-Academy bait & LOTR) and Meet The Feebles just stands out as “How in the hell could this possibly exist? Who is the audience for this despicable piece of cinema?”Turns out it’s me and a couple of other people. And, yes, I do actually take a shower after watching it.
I love that movie, with the highlight being the Sodomy song.
“You may think it’s very odd of me…”
“You might call the wrath of God on me…”
I actually have the soundtrack on vinyl, signed by Peter Jackson. It’s one of my few prized possessions.
That is incredibly awesome.
I’m glad I watched Eraserhead, but I don’t want to see it again.
Same with The Trial – an Anthony Perkins B&W movie based on Kafka’s story.
I have many films on the good or great but never again list.Top for me is not 2001, but another Kubrick film: A Clockwork Orange.Not as great, but still a very good film with several outstanding performances is Silence of the Lambs.It isn’t the violence or even the nihilism per se, because I can watch No Country for Old Men multiple times. There is just something deeply disturbing and off-putting about both of those films. A sense of desecration, perhaps. That somehow they are transmitting the human stain as much as examining it.Obviously this is purely personal and subjective. I know many who feel the same way about my exception (No Country)
I’ve seen pretty polarized reactions to No Country as well (one of my favourite movies), which frankly confuse me, since I didn’t find it very gratuitous, and I’m usually bothered or annoyed enough by that in movies to the point of not enjoying them. I find there’s a difference between depicting cruelty to be observed, and depicting it to be enjoyed, or as a lazy stand-in for character or plot development (This is mostly a fun movie, but let’s establish that the bad guy is bad by having him slowly and brutally murder one of his own for some small transgression, etc. Cue to black, and back to the funny!)
Eighth Grade. It’s just way too real.
Kids
City of God
The Godfather Trilogy
Elephant Man is one of those. I love Lynch, but that movie is just so depressing. Even at its most triumphant it is still heartwrenching.
Bergman’s “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Winter Light” both of which are incredible and very depressing. And while I know he’s a pariah on these boards, Woody Allen’s Interiors is a great one off cause MAN is that his Bergman film.And best of all, no Allen in it.
Aranofsky’s Mother!If you have boundary issues – from growing up with a parent who inappropriately overshared, never gave you any privacy, and used you to meet their emotional needs – it’s almost unbearable.I can’t count how many times I’ve had anxiety nightmares that almost directly mimic scenes in that movie.
I feel like most people say something like Requiem for a Dream which makes me feel weird that I rewatched it so much. I’m realizing the past few Kaufman movies give me that kind of feeling which is odd since there’s so much you can catch on the rewatch but I end up just reading everything online and then completely forgetting the plot after a few days. Meanwhile I consider The Squid and the Whale so painfully uncomfortable and yet I keep coming back to it all the time.
I have made this kind of “I’ll never watch it again” statement before, but I never really mean it. I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream at least three times. Sure it’s emotionally draining, but it’s so damn well made.The closest I’ve come to actually not re-watching is with Inland Empire, which I have still yet to watch a second time. And that’s because I feel like I’ve ruined the magic of some other Lynch films by watching them so many damn times that no part surprises me anymore.
Amistad was just too cruel and heartbreaking.Death Wish: the rape scene at the beginning of the movie was so fucking brutal, even for 1974. I’ve never watched it again.
Oh man, Bastard Out of Carolina. It’s less about the movie itself, and more about what it meant to me. I was a kid when I stumbled across it on TV late one night, still reeling from having been molested, and I sat and watched this movie about this little kid experiencing far worse abuse, but surviving it in the end. I looked up info about the movie and found out that it was based on a book and the book was semi-autobiographical in nature, which to me meant that I could tell people what happened, and they would know, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world.I’ve never gone back to revisit it, and the critical consensus indicates that my memory of it being a good movie with strong performances holds true, so that’s good enough for me.
Ravenous, It’s a Disaster, and Last Supper are the three that come immediately to mind.
I can’t scroll the comments on these slideshows (*side-eyes the powers*), so maybe someone has said this – The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. So amazingly visceral, I just cannot see subjecting myself to its violence again.
But watching the ending is sooooo cathartic! One of the few films to really earn audience sympathy for something so violent.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. Absolutely gorgeously, incredible acting, fantastic soundtrack (two Tom Waits songs!), and superb editing – and I don’t think I will ever be able to watch it again.
(In contrast, I’ll see Schindler’s List exactly one more time, and that’s when I’ll show it to my kids. As a Jew, it’s just too painful to see otherwise.)
Schindler’s List.
I don’t know if documentaries count, but Dear Zachary is far and away the winner for me. It’s a riveting & important story, but so devastating- I was crying so hard that both eyes and nose were waterfalls.
Ding ding dung and yet I recommend it all the time.
I kept scrolling and scrolling the comments waiting for this one to pop up. I was watching it alone late at night and at a particular moment my body let out an involuntary and inhuman groan followed by some intense full body sobbing the likes of which I’d never experienced before or since. Usually I’m more of a stoic, single-tear-down-the-cheek crier, but the combination of sadness and outrage did me in.
It is so hard to watch. I’m pretty sure my nose was running as hard as my tears were.I think it’s a great indicator of how there’s a lot of issues with Canada that gets disregarded and needs fixing. We import a lot of news and media from the US, and viewing the discombobulated monstrosity that is the US government and society tends to make us think we’re structured so much better than the States- even if we are in several ways, we’re not nearly as good as we think.
Paranormal Activity 1 & 2. Saw both in the theater on respective opening weekends; both were incredibly enjoyable, but experiences that relied so much on the collective big-screen haunted house vibe, that would be impossible to replicate at home. Under The Skin. Absolutely floored me sideways, loved it. And there is no way I’m watching that scene on the beach again. And then the second one. Devastating. There’s also a subset of movies that you once enjoyed but which are rendered impossible by revelations about those involved. The Usual Suspects springs to mind, what with Spacey & Singer being human crap sacks.
I first saw The Usual Suspects in college around 2006, and blame my expectations. As a child, I remember hearing some endorsement of, “If you can solve this one, we’ve got a job for you down at the local precinct!” which I never took literally, but always took seriously for the challenge of solving it. It’s no secret that the big reveal – while cinematic – is a huge cheat on the concept of following clues, as they’re all shown to the viewer after the fact. That didn’t ruin it, but it was mostly what I took from it, given my personal hype. I did, however, pretty much always think Kevin Spacey was a smug, pompous asshole, so I guess there’s that.
I had a similar experience, which caused me to figure out it was Spacey because it would be the most shocking reveal.
2001 has to be the all time winner for me. I didn’t like it when I saw it in the theater at all. I just found it tedious, but pretty, like a more serious Star Trek:TMP. I’ve seen it twice since, and both times, I swore it would be the last. I liked the book well enough though. Runners up are the M.Night Shamalan epics I saw on dates. If I could have, I would have walked on Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense. Both of them made me very interested in looking at my watch over and over again. Always the sign of a stinker.
Come and See
I knew going into it the reputation, but I just a few days ago watched The Nightingale. It was really one of those things that I’m glad I watched, and many parts of it were actually really beautiful (the ending scene, the rolling shots of Tasmanian jungle, etc), and also sort of educational for me (growing up in US public schools, we didn’t really learn anything about the Black War – hell, we barely touched on the Korean War and we were in that one) but… yeah, I can see why people at Cannes were walking out in the first ten minutes.
Man Push Cart (2005) – Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) is a Pakistani-born cart vendor who sells bagels and coffee in Manhattan, a humble and bleak means of a living that affords him little comfort. In his former life in Pakistan, he was a rock star. He was also married and had a child. Now his wife is dead, his in-laws refuse him visits with his son, and his job is all he seems to have, but he seems content with his fate. However, a chance encounter with a businessman may change Ahmad’s fortune — for better, or worse.Great film but BLEAK. AS. FUCK.i don’t go to the cinema for reality.
Sid and Nancy. There’s NEVER a good time to rewatch Sid and Nancy.
Fire Walk With Me is a good one for this category. I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks in order to at some point watch the 3rd series but realised that FWWM is meant to be the ‘prequel’ to the whole thing. So I considered watching then but then was I like nah.
When I’m bored and scrolling through the cable guide, I notice that Saving Private Ryan gets shown a lot, which calls to mind what a stressful experience it was to see it in the theater. The death scene of Adam Goldberg’s character was particularly upsetting for me. I steadfastly refuse to watch another minute of it.
Any gay film that ends on death or suffering or breakup, thanks. And most or every film that is about kids suffering.
Oldboy springs to mind for me. It was great, but man, I’ll quite happily not watch it ever again.
Now I feel I should reevaluate many of my life choices since the mentioned movies in the comments here are a significant part of my regular rewatch rotation.
Blue Valentine. Great writing and acting. I liked seeing the contrast between youthful hope for the future and then finding out that it all fell apart as time passed. I liked seeing the kind of dumpy jobs they fell into once they couldn’t rest on the artsy idealism of the hustle. But it was also a weirdly unrewarding viewing experience that just made me feel BAD without digging deeper into the lived situation.
I almost never want to rewatch any movie. It’s rare that I want to spend time re-experiencing something that I’ve already experienced, especially in this Age of Content. But I doubly hate rewatching horror movies. They just never feel the same the second time through. You see the seams more easily. For instance, I tried watching Hereditary again recently, and…eh.
Johnny Got His Gun. Anti-war movie came out about 1970. Dalton Trumbo book. And screenplay(?)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Avatar
Forrest Gump
Castaway
Titanic
I walked away from The Rise of Skywalker having enjoyed it, but knowing with a certainty that if I saw it again, I wouldn’t be able to ignore its obvious terribleness.
American Psycho. It was entertaining as hell in places, but the nihilism and violence is so much and so evil that I never want to see it again.
Uncut Gems is a good choice. But I;m going to go with Grave of the Fireflies. It’s about a brother and sister trying to survive on their own in Kobe during and shortly after WW2.
Farewell My Concubine and Leaving Las Vegas. Both incredible movies that moved me deeply… and I’d prefer not to be moved that way again.
Grave of The Fireflies. That movie is brutal. Also just recently watched Come And See. That was bad too.
Mysterious Skin. It destroyed me. I only watched it a second time because a friend thought it might help her cope with the same tragedy as that of the two main protagonists (it did) and she didn’t want to watch it alone. It’s an important film full of powerful performances that I don’t think I could handle a third time.
I know the answer to this because I got talked into seeing it a second time and heavily regretted it. The Revenant. Movie has incredible cinematography and it kept me in awe the entire time I first saw the movie. The second time, I focused more on the runtime and plot and it did not work nearly as well. Still think it’s a great movie but never want to see it again.
American Beauty, saw it in the theatre and really enjoyed it but whenever I have a chance to see it again, I take a pass. Same with Monster’s Ball, maybe because it was so heartbreaking but once was enough.
Kids. Never again.
The VVitch.Enjoyed it, Hell of an experience, but I never need to see a witch murdering a newborn and then writhing around in his guts again.
Reading these comments I thought of an experiment: Watch a movie and then watch it again right after. In a theater, buy a ticket for the next showing. Of course people do this quite a bit for a movie they love, but do it for a movie that was difficult to sit through or a movie you didn’t particularly like. You’re not going to get the same emotional reaction if any from a second viewing that close to the first. I watched Saving Private Ryan with a friend and that night my parents wanted to see it and I tagged along. I didn’t feel much. But this probably isn’t a general response for all movies you immediately re-see. I guess my point is that length of time between viewings is very important. Too soon or too late the magic of the experience is gone.
Mine would be 1981 West German film Christiane F. The vivid drug scenes, withdrawals, OD’s and child sex workers were far too disturbing. Great soundtrack though. IMO
One I can’t really watch again is the original Sleuth, because the whole film is so dependent on a suprise twist that it looses much of it’s impact the second time. The first time around was a heck of a ride, though.
Elephant was seen as opportunistic at the time, but its held up as the best cinematic comment on the phenomena of school shootings, and for me is one of Gus’s last truly brilliant works. Also, and I hate to say this about such a cruel and violent film, it’s filmed gorgeously.
Buried. It’s a brilliant movie, and I’m glad I saw it, and I recommend it for career-best Ryan Reynolds, but by all the fucks in Fuckington, I’ll never be able to handle going back there.
THE DEAD DON’T DIE was like that, I enjoyed it well enough but between the fourth-wall taps (and eventual break) and the sorta… pointlessness of it all, I thought well that was a fun little exercise in character, dialogue and performance, and I don’t care if I ever see it again.
On the plus side, I didn’t have to pay for it beyond the time spent, so that adds a bit of goodwill to my viewing experience.
Grave of the Fireflies. Beautiful, tragic, important, and miserable. Glad I watched it, but I have no desire to do that to myself again.
A likely controversial take, but Salo should not be on this list. That film has so many different layers and subplots (the interests/motivations/conformities/plights of the various tiers of characters, most notably) that are impossible to absorb in one viewing. If you’re put off by the style and Pasolini’s confrontational style in the film, then honestly I’d say it’s not even worth sticking around to the end of 1 viewing. The typical modern response for audiences seeing it for the first time tend to find the film tame and don’t understand its lore as a shocker. For those, I absolutely recommend a 2nd viewing to focus less on the Libertines and their motivations, and instead on everyone else’s. It’s a *far* more conventional (and frankly, great) film when that element is considered.Plus, for the well-read or adventurous out there, viewing through the lens of the opening Bibliography (Klossowski, Barthes, etc.) gets you closer to the frame which Pasolini chose to place his anger.
The Pianist (but not due to the squick factor that is Roman Polanski).I’ve only seen it once, but I feel like the whole movie is burned into my psyche, particularly the execution scene when the Nazi officer has to reload his gun while the guy on the ground just lies there waiting to die. Ugh.
Movie I’ll never watch again: Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible.
Movie I could watch 100000 times: Raising Arizona.
“Grave of Fireflies” is the best movie that I don’t think I can watch again. It’s too heartbreaking and probably one of the best movies about war.
Both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Though I have gone back and watched clips from both movies. These movies should really be required viewing by… everyone. Especially Americans who said “Never again” after we found out what was going on in concentration camps in Europe in WWII.Imagine if Hitler had not only won the war, but was still in power, and was a celebrity, who bragged and glorified and like… got choked up with pride… about all the indiscriminate killing. That’s how it is in Indonesia, on a slightly smaller scale. Just fucking unbelievable. There’s really no way of attacking this subject in a sober documentary. That’s why there are surrealist elements in it. Not unlike Night and Fog (1956).
Hmmm…none recently, but 12 YEARS A SLAVE stands out. Fantastically crafted and acted film, but hot damn if it didn’t just make me feel all sick inside. Though I was riveted by it when I first saw it, I knew immediately afterwards that I’d never see it again. In fact, I said just that to my brother who saw it with me. He agreed.
A ton of things from my childhood, like “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” (1981) or “Invaders from Mars” (1986). Kid me loved them, but adult me knows why you’ve never seen them shown on any channel.
Schindler’s List, partially because of how people in my class reacted to it when we saw it in school. I was the only Jewish kid in class, and a handful of the other kids reacted as if the death scenes were funny, or by telling me they thought Liam Neeson was in a Nazi uniform*, and because the Nazi uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss, I must not ‘get’ high fashion because I didn’t find them kinky.
People also laughed at Hotel Rwanda in the same class, but it was at a scene that was arguably meant to be funny on purpose, albeit in a very dark way (the scene where the kid comes in covered in blood, but none of it is his).
*(Had they been saying this about him in, say, Nell or The Phantom Menace, I wouldn’t have had an issue with it.)
I saw 2001 many, many times, and read books about its making. I do NOT want to see again two films: Ichi the Killer and A Serbian Film, thank you no thank you.